Quotes About Introspection

Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination of melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small blue planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.

He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself." (About Robert Mapplethorpe)

I awoke with a mild hangover.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

I was my own lucky hand of solitaire.

I'm more materialistic about myself than I am about objects

We go on dates thinking that person is our future husband or wife, without getting to know them, as we live in a fantasy and an illusion of romance.

What's your life philosophy, Leo?" "I haven't figured it out yet." Abbey considers this. "'I haven't figured it out yet' is not a bad life philosophy

What Salinger found when he examined their world in a fiercely realistic way was an assemblage of unhappy people living unfulfilled lives.

We will not ever know ourselves again. Like the light that moves between the bars of light we sometimes called death, we , too, will have flowered, even with such unquenchable flames as these.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.