Quotes About Introspection

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right now doing wrong.

Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.

The phone rings, but she doesn't pick up. It's one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight.

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.

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

listen to what other people called silence

She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.

In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. "My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about," says Bethe, "and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

Now we are all sons of bitches.' 

There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world's domination systems.

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.