Quotes About Introspection

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

Careful how you bare yer soul Careful not to bare it all

Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words.

One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat.

I clawed through a thick web of the culture's consciousness that I hadn't known existed.

He had ignored nature and now turned to her for his salvation, and set about to make peace with her, bowing to her mysteries.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Ich war zu neugierig auf die Zukunft, um zurückzuschauen.

Mein Hemd war etwas zerknittert, aber warum sollte es ihm besser gehen als mir.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me, like the worn canvas sack of an angst-driven teenage hockey player?

Eu não conseguia me identificar com movimentos políticos. Quando tentava participar de algum, sentia-me tomada por outra forma de burocracia. Perguntava-me se alguma coisa que fazia tinha importância.

All writers are bums...

Varför måste man skriva? För att ställa sig vid sidan om, som i en kokong, försjunken i ensamhet, på trots mot andras behov. Virginia Woolf hade sitt rum. Proust sina stängda fönsterluckor. Marguerite Duras sitt tysta hus. Dylan Thomas sin enkla bod. Alla var de ute efter en tomhet att fylla med ord. Orden som ska tränga in i orörda marker, uppdaga oinmutade associationer, ge uttryck åt oändligheten.

I thought of Thomas Paine's words: these are the times that try men's souls. Outside, the rain ceased but high winds remained. And what was truth remained the truth. It was the last day of the year of the monkey and the golden cockerel was crowing, for the insufferable yellow-haired confidence man had been sworn in, with a Bible no less, and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed seemed somewhere else entirely.

I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling — confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph — and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer's debris.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

the signs that mock me as I go.

I'm sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.