Quotes About Introspection

matters less than your consciousness about that life.

You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life," Margot said.

Books will change your life... you have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life. You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself.

I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and … in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters

When you falter, all eludes. This is a seasick way, this almost/never touching, this drawing-off, this to-and-fro. Subtlety stalks in your eyes, your tongue knows what it knows. I want your secrets - I will have them out. Seasick, I drop into the sea.

in every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.

Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar My roots are not my chains And I to you:   Whose hands have grown through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who? But yours was the one, the only eye assumed Did we turn each other into liars? holding hands with each others' chains?

I do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things

I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

We cut the wires, find ourselves in free-fall, as if our true home were the undimensional solitudes, the rift in the Great Nebula.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude

I refuse to become a seeker for cures. Everything that has ever helped me has come through what already lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong across my heart. This is from where my strength comes, even when I miss my strength even when it turns on me like a violent master.

Personally, I find it very hard to absent myself from any situation, due to overwhelming self-consciousness. There's always a voice in my head passing comment and making sure nothing can be enjoyed for what it is.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.

I'm not passive aggressive. If something bothers me, I think about it, then I act on it. I express it.