Quotes About Introspection

The world and all the people in it had suddenly slipped beyond her comprehension and she felt in great danger of losing the whole world once and for all--a feeling that is difficult to explain.

I believe sincerely that only those men who reach the stage where it is possible for them to combat a second tragedy within themselves, and not the first over again, are worthy of being called mature.

Lord, is it I . . .? There is so much good in the worst of us And so much bad in the best of us That it behoves not any of us To talk about the rest of us.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.

There is a little dull ache for Oblomov and his dreams. Man does not live by bread alone, not even by the most wholesome bread punctually served. There is dream-stuff as well as bread-stuff. Sometimes man's strength is to sit still.

There was something about other people's grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn't be looking.

When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.

I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.

I was seeing something I didn't understand and did not want to. No I wasn't. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.

Every time we try and get it together, something happens to pull us apart, and I can't help but feel that this is just isn't meant to be. And God knows I'm happy enough on my own, but tell me, is this how am I supposed to carry on?

it always made him feel better, and calmer, and more sane, to hold a book. He had never been able to understand people who did not read. He had never been able to understand how they held on to themselves.

Halfway across town, Father Tibor Kasparian lay on the long hard cement cot that was what this jail cell had for a bed and wished he had a book. It could be any book. He didn't really think he could read right now, but it always made him feel better, and calmer, and more sane, to hold a book. He had never been able to understand people who did not read. He had never been able to understand how they held on to themselves.

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

I have since wondered if a person can know how deep a thing goes without getting outside of it, without taking it apart, without, in fact, ruining it.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, I whose choices made her what she will be?

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one's self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove

Here is a soul, accepting nothing.

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)

A person falling does not, mid-plummet, look up.

The self in exile remains the self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.