Quotes About Introspection

Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.

You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.

Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person's, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.

I'm the fat little humiliation he's married to.

Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.

Walter non aveva mai capito come vivere, ma adesso lo capiva meno che mai

To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing.

It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

Time stops for the duration of a cigarette: when you're smoking, you're acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious rush of life. This is why the condemned are allowed a final cigarette...it's a lot easier to leave the world if you're certain that you have really been in it.

Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.

You know you'd rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

gli parve di essere sbucato fuori non solo dagli acquitrini, ma anche dalla domenica, e di essere finito tra le dune di un ottavo, anonimo giorno della settimana che lui era l'unica persona al mondo a conoscere.

It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...

the difference between him and her was her capacity for self-deception.

I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house.

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

Aveva perso le tracce di ciò che voleva, e poiché una persona è ciò che vuole, si poteva dire che avesse perso le tracce di se stesso.

But what you are saying now, the way you're speaking to me - there's a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It's kind of amazing to see it now.

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone ~~Jonathan Franzen

theoretically sorry

The first thing reading teaches us is how to be alone

A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women.