Quotes About Introspection

It's a time when men and women come to know what they truly are. A time of purging." I'd been looking at the ceiling as he spoke. At his final words, I turned to face him in surprise. "Is that what the Catholics mean by purgatory?" "In essence." He nodded. "A period during which each soul is cleansed by a self-imposed recognition of past deeds—and misdeeds.

Rather than go on suffering, he had learned to stultify himself to introspection. Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on day-to-day survival marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it.

Of only one thing I am certain. If the manuscript is true, all of us had better examine our lives. Carefully.

Always let your conscience be your guide is advice of doubtful value. Conscience must be, among other things, a list of sayings, an anthology of quotations and precepts. Where did they come from, and who first wrote them on my empty slate, and why?

Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us.

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

That's the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Life became an interruption of my description of it.

every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there.

He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi's Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body's most private moments, something else joins in.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

What?" he asks the tree. "What? " The tree feels no need to reply.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

That's the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it's different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious? Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. And? What does? Mostly other people.

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

I'd given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal.