Quotes About Introspection

Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

Well, you can't have too much conscience about things!" said Gladys. "Or else you'll never stop worrying!" And that, I'm afraid, was the extent of our moral agonies. Subject closed.

Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.

Admit what you did... Take your lumps... The sooner you get flattened to the ground, the sooner you can begin to rebuild your life again.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress.

For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane.

La gente cree que un alma gemela es la persona con la que encajas perfectamente, que es lo que quiere todo el mundo. Pero un alma gemela auténtica es un espejo, es la persona que te saca todo lo que tienes reprimido, que te hace volver la mirada hacia dentro para que puedas cambiar tu vida. Una verdadera alma gemela es, seguramente, la persona mas importante que vayas a conocer en tu vida, porque te tira abajo todos los muros y te despierta de un porrazo.

I'm not sure anybody out there really knows what they're doing. Apparently not

Nunca olvides que una vez, en el momento más inesperado, te viste a ti misma como una amiga.

at any given moment, and that night, going back to

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences...

How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage, only to leave it?

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth—the virtues or the malevolence.

be a scientist of your own spiritual experience.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

I did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn't seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn't

finally realized that my fear was boring. Mind you, my fear had always been boring to everybody else, but it wasn't until mid-adolescence that it became, at last, boring even to me. My fear became boring to me, I believe, for the same reason that fame became boring to Jack Gilbert: because it was the same thing every day.

To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

What happened now? he would ask -- another man thoroughly exhausted by me.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings. It's

Look how little I need, Prudence seemed to be saying. Behold my goodness.

I know every inch of fear, from head to toe.

So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters. You don't need to know what anything means.