Quotes About Introspection

s Morgens ben ik het liefst alleen, ik wil een paar uur voor mezelf. Later op de dag heb ik behoefte aan anderen. Een week teruggetrokken leven, in mijn eentje, doet mij erg veel deugd. Maar aan het einde van zo'n week kan ik meestal niet snel genoeg bij mijn geliefden zijn. De wankeling tussen het verlangen om samen te vallen met de ander en te verdwijnen in hem of haar enerzijds, en het verlangen naar autonomie en dus naar scheiding van hem of haar anderzijds, zit ingebakken in wie wij zijn.

Ariette III Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville ; Quelle est cette langueur Qui pénètre mon coeur ? Ô bruit doux de la pluie Par terre et sur les toits ! Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie, Ô le chant de la pluie ! Il pleure sans raison Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure. Quoi ! nulle trahison ? Ce deuil est sans raison. C'est bien la pire peine De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon coeur a tant de peine !

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.1 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Loneliness is not the worst emotion

The truth about people had not much to do with what they said about themselves, or what others said about them.

You know there isn't much to do in life once you fall though the surface of things.

It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.

People like you…stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.

Imagination is conjunctive and unifying; the sour, habitual wars of the self are disjunctive and separating. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

Grown-ups always seem to be worried about money, or politics, or just stuff that has physical presence. It's like somewhere along the way they lost the ability to think about what's inside them.

Truly humble people are grounded in reality; they neither preen under illusions of greatness nor suffer agonies of self-hatred.

the development of a humble heart. In Lent, we are invited to look deeply inside, identify what is impeding our ability to follow Christ along the path of humility, and begin applying antidotes. Early church tradition is rich in the

Monday: Cover Your Mirrors for a Whole Morning

My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.

I don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

It was terrible to feel so empty, as if I were nothing. Why couldn't I be happy? And just what was happines anyway?

There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.

What are you thinking? Just of how much you've changed me. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.