Quotes About Introspection

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that make us retreat from further participation.

We might at first label the body's simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body's simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.

To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.

What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.

We each have a particular way of shaping ourselves in the world. To take on someone else's conversational style and to keep repeating other people's questions as if they were our own is to exhaust ourselves. It doesn't matter if it is the thoughts of Socrates or Susan Sontag. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

beginning well means seating ourselves in the body again, catching up with ourselves and the person we have become since we last tried to begin.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.

Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned.

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

It's just a real gentle moment. I'm here by myself and I don't mind. I kind of wish it could just stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.

My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.

She said, "Why do you, like, hate yourself?" "If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

We moved in silence for a moment and I said, "How did we screw this all up so badly, John?" He shook his head. "We always find a way.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked "That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?" "Actually, yeah.

John jolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.

mental state

I collect. Though I guess that wording would imply that I seek this stuff out; I actually meant "collect" in the way that dead bugs "collect" on your windshield.

Sometimes I need a place to ask myself impossible questions.

His silence helps him come off as something of a seer, a whispering muse.

I wanted silence in the flowers, not to not say, but to not have the impulse of saying.]