Quotes About Introspection

This was a rule I had discovered about her. Confessing to minor violations could lead to a reword of a sort.

I never want to regret. 'Regret' is the ugliest word.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

God, the names. You could almost walk into the words themselves." Now Jack put down his cup. He'd never heard anyone say that and it was true. For a moment he lost the blithe tempo of their conversation that had shielded him from his own shyness.

But I should have known.

Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don't say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

Sometimes I catch myself being a person I wouldn't tolerate for five minutes at my own kitchen table. Being a thoughtless, self-centered jerk.

hope to do in the pages that follow is to explain first of all how I, gently brought up in a loving home and diligently instructed by conscientious teachers, should have come to reject so completely what they said. I had some good reasons for refusing some of it. My mistake was to dispense with it all, indiscriminately. I hope to show that one of the things I was schooled in was not, in fact, religion, but a strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it—a counterfeit

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without awareness that I'm carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

People lack the talent of listening. They miss the experience of a fascinating law of nature: The moment when a narrator is captivated by his own story.

Heart-level honesty in the presence of God postures us for change.

Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought, word and deed…. The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves.

The question should not be "What would Jesus do?" but rather, more dangerously, "What would Jesus have me do?" The onus is not on Jesus but on us, for Jesus did not come to ask semidivine human beings to do impossible things. He came to ask human beings to live up to their full humanity; he wants us to live in the full implication of our human gifts, and that is far more demanding.

The question should not be 'What would Jesus do?' but rather, and more dangerously, 'What would Jesus have me do?'...As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, 'It is not what I don't understand in the Bible that troubles me; it is what is perfectly clear that does.

of isolation.

Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own.

G]radually, skillfully, [Parmenides] conjures up the image of us humans as stuck at this place where the road divides—unable to decide between the two paths, incapable even of seeing what the choice involves, just dithering in the space in between.