Quotes About Introspection

The trouble with anyone when they're unhappy or in a relationship they recognize is not working but don't know what to do about is that they can't see farther out than that. If the relationship is not working, if what was there isn't there anymore, you have to do something about it.

You don't have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is "I don't know".

Turning points announce themselves through a variety of vague symptoms: deep restlessness, a yearning with no name, inexplicable boredom, the feeling of being stuck. Gloria Karpinski

No matter the origin, it's you who notices an idea and gives it weight; the perception is always happening in you.

Don't forget that, Celia. There's more to life than flowery words and orgasms.

Quem na lama quer remexer, que lama seja.

Queremos transformar o mundo e somos incapazes de nos transformar a nós próprios. Queremos ser livres, fazemos a nossa vontade, e a todo o momento arranjamos desculpas para reprimir os nossos desejos

One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it....

Then she turns to me. 'Tell me. How are you really?' she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator.

But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.

There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy.

I opened my eyes as if to a new beginning; nothing I saw was familiar to me, my head was empty, no thoughts, everything quite clean and the sky transparently blue, and I didn't know what I was called or even recognize my own body. Unnamed, I floated around looking at the world for the first time and felt it strangely illuminated and glassily beautiful...

I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving.

the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is

I should have said the right thing just then, but I did not know what that would be, if such a thing existed, I did not think so, and those who said it did, knew nothing. So I said the first thing that came into my head. "Are you afraid?". I said.

I wonder whether that is how we get to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see.

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence.

En av mine mange redsler er å bli mannen med den frynsete jakka og den uknepte buksesmekken foran kassa på Samvirkelaget, med egg på skjorta og mer til fordi speilet i gangen har slutta å virke. En havarert mann uten anker noe annet sted enn i sine egne flytende tanker der tida har mista sin rekkefølge.

One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict - girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.

Perhaps nothing had happened. Perhaps everything had happened.

I lay awake for the balance of the night letting my dream shatter into indecipherable pieces the way dreams do.

At eighteen I realized I was eighteen and not so smart, or special and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward, and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact my brother, second year medical student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, "Geek." "It's not my fault," I said.

Why are people so fucked up?" I asked "Maybe you do need college, Poiter," Everett said. "You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that's about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It's because they're people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody.