Quotes About Introspection

How then, in the time that followed, did I become someone I didn't know?

I hate the idea of success robbing you of your private life.

Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.

The key to success is having the awareness to appreciate – in the words of the French novelist Anaïs Nin 'we see the world not as it is but as we are.' It's recognizing that we see events through our own mental filters and give our own meaning to those events – a meaning which may be very different to someone else's.

If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way—that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for.

I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.

a body on the sand. My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry

It doesn't matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you're right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn't work – it's like that, or maybe it isn't, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody's throat….

You only grow when you are alone.

Having appointed ourselves judge, jury and executioner, and having declared someone else "wrong," we feel superior to that person.

Only we can decide how important emotional independence and emotional sobriety are, and what we are willing to do to obtain and maintain them.

I blame my emotional state on what is happening outside me rather than admitting that at every moment of every day, consciously or unconsciously, I exercise a choice as to my mood and how I am going to feel.

It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us." I take this to mean that we need to take our eyes off what the other person has done to us and look at what we have done to ourselves.

the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.2

I find myself writing this manuscript and talking to others about controlling feelings when I'm not always able to control my own. At times, not only can I not control my feelings, I can't control my thinking or my actions.

That's why it's difficult to write about your own life. Any distortion feels like a betrayal.

most of the problems we think we have stem from too much self-focus rather than too little.

Sit up to slow down,

What was inside him would never go away. What had happened would never not have happened.

Sometimes Anatole wonders just where the elusive point is, where you stop being sane.

She thinks about the salt point, that mysterious, elusive moment of change.