Quotes About Introspection

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman. She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.

But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.

He pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at it's centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests.

These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing

She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple.

Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: 'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.

he was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.

It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But

to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.

Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.

The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in—two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts at his heels.

In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger

All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain

She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?

He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.

You like so much to be alone?" "Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.