Quotes About Introspection

His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season's dark afternoons and long nights.

him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing

He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.

What's it do?" she said. "Absolutely nothing," Hibbard replied, "if you are in perfect mental health. However, let's face it, who is?

entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

He'd realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.

It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death.

Cuando te quedas en tu habitación y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desdén o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos años, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relación real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.

The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals.

Escúchame. Soy tímido. No tonto. No puedo mirar a la gente a los ojos. No sé si entiendes lo que se siente. Hay todo un mundo que existe a mi alrededor, lo sé. No es que no quiera mirarte. Es que no quiero que me vean. Tengo miedo de lo que veréis dentro de mi. Me avergüenzo, me da miedo que me mires a los ojos y descubras algo malo, estropeado.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.

Sometimes it's better not to think in questions, but I can't seem to get out of the habit.

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.