Quotes About Introspection

As summer turns to fall, Vincent, at twenty-six, is alone.

I know you're fond of brooding, but I'm an old man. Your silences make me wonder whether I've actually gone deaf.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.

That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar.

It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person? A phantom.

Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?' 'Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

My mother's words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

He glanced drowsily at Laura and Mitchell eating their strawberries in the sunshine and found himself about to fall asleep. It was an odd sensation, 'to find himself' about to fall into sleep. As if he could find himself anywhere at any time.

In her view, this is because a man's love of a woman is not what gives him his self-worth. I was no longer interested in exploring this kind of dynamic in

Her sad girl breath makes me dizzy.

The Poet wipes her eyes on the corner of my tablecloth. 'Perhaps the modern tragedy, Lapinski, is that we weep and do not know what we are weeping for. This is quite different from catharsis.' She suddenly throws back her head and roars with laughter; her gold teeth rattle

Too much of oneself can be projected into the silence

If you only behave because an invisible man in the sky is watching, then you don't own your own moral structure. Your moral framework is based outside yourself, separate from your reasoning.

Now he was fifty-six and the thought of getting to know a woman all over again filled him with a panic-stricken desolation.

So we sit, inside our separate skins, and every now and then lean forward to gaze hard at another person and read his or her looks. We ask, 'how's the weather in there?' And if they can answer, if they so choose, we're privileged to share for a brief time what it means to be other than who we are. Might it be that animals share--to varying degrees, inside their varied skins--these same shadowy contents from which love, terror, grief, compassion, and shame spring?

This has been one of my biggest surprises in writing this book: the distinction beetween introverts and extraverts did not come up in any of my previous books about relationships, but it emerged early on a significant factor in this one.

He stared at Esmelda with a face like glass, nothing hidden. What I saw there wasn't steel or fire or stone. Feelings stirred in me and I had to look away. I knew what I saw because I'd felt them, too — understanding, sadness, compassion...forgiveness.

He knows solitude. He knows its pleasure and its power. He knows it is a home you can occupy.

deflating like a stuck balloon. She couldn't help but watch as they looked into

thoughts, he paused using a