Quotes About Introspection

You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

At 53, she was through with the foolishness of men's genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short lived, not terribly virulent and ultimately cured by marriage as God intended.

the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

Had I been more, I'd be more. Simple.

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

As always, to Sully, the deepest of life's mysteries were the mysteries of his own behavior.

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.

Like I said, what makes people tick isn't neccessarily what makes them good. Fast-forward

Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around

I'm not hurting. That's the strange part. I don't mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I'll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I'd even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I'd missed a sign, and that if I hadn't, things would've been different.

A healthy obsession, we could say, interrogates its own driving convictions.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.