Quotes About Introspection

It's hard to get to know your unconscious because … it's unconscious. However, thanks to projection, we can externalize our unconscious, and that then gives us the chance to interact with it and come to an understanding of it, and finally allow us to withdraw our projections and integrate them into our consciousness. We make sense of our unconscious via its projections, via what it latches onto in the world around us.

propel them backward, not forward, to reflect on what their lives have meant—to themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large.

the third kind of thing we don't think about—the things the thinking of which just plain scares us. The things the thinking of which would change everything.

I'd had a relationship with a French girl, a Japanese girl, an American girl, a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'

It was as if he'd arrived at the center of himself after a long journey through the wilderness of his own soul.

It was clear that being mentally prepared to die was not quite the same as staring death in the face.

J'ai lentement déshabillé son apparence pour savoir qui elle était. (Dix-huit ans, p.143)

J'ai tenté d'être face à elle un homme fort conscient de ses faiblesses, un homme vêtu qui ne craint pas sa nudité, un homme droit qui connaît ses courbes et ses fractures. Tout ce chemin que j'ai fait pour la rencontrer m'a permis de me parcourir moi-même, c'est long de se parcourir.

How could anyone be"Cary Grant"? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?

A veces, cuando algún profesor termina la explicación y pregunta si ha quedado alguna duda, Sylvia tiene ganas de levantar la mano y decir sí, ¿podría volver a empezar desde el principio?, pero desde el principio del principio, desde que nacemos, porque aún no he comprendido nada en estos casi dieciséis años de vida.

Siente una especie de dolor en el pecho, intenso pero placentero. Es como si hubiera una herida, pero una herida leve, una marca en la piel que quieres acariciar, reconocer, disfrutarla por todo lo que significa para ti. Ahora que aún está, porque es posible que, pronto, desaparezca.

Nos hacemos mayores, pero no nos hacemos mejores.

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

Displaced by darkness, you lie flat on your back, putting the world behind you, and stare at the moon, the embarrassing moon, with nothing to offer it, no ebb or flow, no wolfish transformations except this lunacy you keep to yourself

I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I'm with my own thoughts, I start to unravel myself, and I start to think really dark thoughts, self-destructive thoughts.

inside of a man lies a heart, but in a heart does not lie a man.

Never be too willing to expose yourself to your weaknesses. Find ways to curve your weaknesses by forming buffers between your vices and your heart.

It doesn't matter what we choose. It simply matters what we are.

Soon they would spend all day there, locked up inside the truck, reading undisturbed. There were no windows but there were thousands of windows, in every book on every shelf.

Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.

Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own.

Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being. Any fancy ideas we have about ourselves are shriven away by the reality of the moment. We come to earth with a thump. It may be a narrow piece of ground, but at least it is real and at least it is our own.