Quotes About Introspection

you've reached a place where many years of simple errors in judgment have compounded over time, and you're feeling it.

Every alcoholic who has stopped drinking can remember the last time he got drunk. For me, it was the night I drank so much Crown Royal my scrotum turned into a purple pouch with a gold-tasseled drawstring.

learning how to disappear is the best way I've found to make my true self visible to myself and others.

If you were me, which I am,

way counselors would shut someone down when they started arguing that they didn't have to listen, they were going to do it their own way. The counselors would point out that "Your best thinking is what put you here.

What you make of the song or what the world will make of it is of little concern when contrasted with the joy that I've talked about many times now—the joy of disappearing long enough to find something you didn't know you had inside you.

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven't changed instead." A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she'd upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction...My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become part of them with ease.

If I don't have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.

What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?

Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?

I didn't answer her. All I could have said was I don't know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you've done. If you cannot live with what you've done, you cannot live with what others have done either.

There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time . . .

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.

He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's a defiance in that, too.

Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.

Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.

You wouldn't understand me even if I made sense.

Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it's always a shock when it happens to you.}