Quotes About Introspection

You are only able to love in the first place if you love yourself, if you believe in yourself, if you know yourself. Only then can you approach the other.… Love can only come if you are clear about who you are.

Then she made herself a hot-water bottle, for company as much as warmth, and went slowly up to bed.

It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

I was also working on the question: Why hadn't I extricated myself sooner? Why had I not reacted for so long? Why couldn't I give up the idea sooner of marriage and at least entertained the possibility of being on my own sooner? The version of myself who was worrying about the correct way to press the elevator button was not actually me, so why had I allowed her to exist and walk around and go to playgrounds and sit in libraries and shop for dinner for so long?

Doris Lessing: You only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self, and your appearance when you get a bit older...a whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize that what in fact you've been using to get attention has been what you look like...it really is a most salutary and fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all.

Ever since childhood, I've felt a tension between who I think I should be-- smarter, more confident, more creative, more adventurous, more out going- and who I am: quiet, introspective, sensitive, and solitary. If I could only be better, I think- a better wife, a better mother, a better writer, a better human- then I would feel more sure of myself and more worthy. More deserving of life.

Man is incapable of seeing past the end of his nose. He huddles upon the ground staring at his own feet. It is only when he considers his own mortality that he clings to whatever God or Buddha offers him hope.

Even when I'm writing about shape shifters and magical lands, I'm looking into my own heart.

I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

How could I tell him that my loneliness was crushing? How it felt awful to be lonely but not know how to reach out to people and fill the time I always had too much of? It wasn't that I didn't enjoy being alone, because I did, and could spend hours on solitary endeavors like reading or going for long walks without ever wishing for human companionship...sometimes I craved the presence of someone, especially if I could be myself.

I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile.

I can't think, I can't calm this murderous cauldron, my grand ideas of an hour ago seem absurd and pathetic, my life is in ruins and - worse still - ruinous; my body is uninhabitable. It is raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok. In the mirror I see a creature I don't know but must live with and share my mind with. I understand why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely.

I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger.

I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.

I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.

You need to remember that. If you're to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.

But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,' he said, 'and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn't that how it might be, trying to learn Josie's heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn't there always be others you'd not yet entered?

Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one's life

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.