Quotes About Introspection

They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.

in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

What else we know? Nothing. That´s why we´re sitting together in this car now. Because we´re the same, and because we don´t know a damn thing other than that.

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see.

Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him.

I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it.

We are all aliens to ourselves.

In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.

We are not where we are . . . but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust—and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness.

If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet, if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?

Sami sebe sme všetci cudzincami, a ak vôbec máme po?atie o tom, kto sme, je to iba preto, že žijeme v o?iach druhých.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

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.

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

?nsan bir kez kendine kar?? olmaya ba?lad? m?, ba?ka herkesin de kar?? oldu?unu dü?ünür.

as I write this now, I realize that even on that first day I had slipped through a hole in the earth, that I was falling into a place where I had never been before.