Quotes About Introspection

To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

If today people sit and meditate only one or two hours, looking only at their own egos, and call this reflection, how can anything come of it?

Middle age is the time of life that a man first notices in his wife.

the danger comes when we allow the good we have found in someone to blind us to their darker side

Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as... from a lack of bread.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite ... and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?

You see? I don't know what 'mature' means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn't know. It's all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn't that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I've been watching people talk and thinking that all my life. And maybe it means there's something awful the matter with me, but it's true.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Her voice had been the only sound in the room for ten minutes or more, and it had been continuous. She seemed keenly aware of this, but aware too that if she allowed herself to stop the house would fill with a silence as thick as water, an impossibly deep, wide pool in which she would flounder and drown.

Oh-h-h-h— Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty Who the hell are we? Flim, flam, God damn We're the infantry…

that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother.

That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him.

I'm sure it's probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?

Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded—Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch"—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—"by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!

She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.

Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn't she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life.

Se si vuole fare qualcosa di assolutamente onesto, qualcosa di vero, alla fine si scopre sempre che è una cosa che va fatta da soli.

How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you've lost all your belief in yourself?

he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was "interesting