Quotes About Introspection

My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Solitude is part of my life, and I don't mind that. I like it. I love it. I don't allow loneliness to be part of my life, let's put it that way. I really won't allow it. If I feel lonely, I phone somebody or I go for a walk or a swim, get the endorphins going, because I hate feeling lonely.

A lot of the time, when I swim, I close my eyes because it is definitely lonely.

I'm pretty over swimming, guys.

Swimming forced me to deal with the things I wanted to escape. It helped me work through a lot of feelings and frustrations, because I had hours under water just to swim laps and think.

In the past I've been very into the falling part, very into the swimming in the dark, deep emotional water. 'Rampart' I really went into it and it took me three times as long to get out of that depression as it did to just do the scenes. I had to learn to give it my all and then go home and laugh.

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.

My mind is never stopping. I think, if you stop, you die. Maybe it is a problem for me - I have to talk to myself and say, 'Please stop. Switch off.'

After boarding school in Switzerland, at, like, 14 or 15, my life clicked, and I just realized, 'I don't want to be like anyone around me at my school. I don't think the world revolves around money.'

I grew up in Switzerland, in this kind of rigidity. It was Protestant, and I was rather shy. That influenced me a lot.

Would I change anything? I don't know, that's a double edge sword for me.

Self-analysis is the sworn enemy of regret-free living.

I would never know how to sell myself as a sex symbol. That's not how I'm programmed.

I didn't want to be a sex symbol. That was perhaps my mistake, but you can't really change who you are.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.

A lot of the messed-up stuff that men inflict on women is kind of a symptom of the messed-up stuff that they should be dealing with themselves.

The primary symptom of a controller is denial, that is I can't see its symptoms in myself.

I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.

I no longer get into stupid thought wormholes about identity and stuff. At one time, I did have some impostor syndrome about acting, but then I remembered I've been doing this since I was little, actually.

We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.