Quotes About Introspection

Absolutely. It's the unhappy people who get things done. Have you ever noticed that? They build things. And discover things. And invent things. Like calculus. Only a very unhappy person could have come up with that. The happy ones just sit around eating strudel.

Humans are good at denial. Especially when it comes to me.

Sometimes, Belle, our troubles are too deep for words

Difficulties are things that show people what they are!

Life's all about the revolution, isn't it? The one inside, I mean. You can't change history. You can't change the world. All you can ever change is yourself.

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.

Me?' I laughed. 'I'm guilty.

You love your music." "I did when I was trying to shut everything out. Now I'm trying to let everything in.

and the question is, which one is really "you

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what

The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

and it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.

Ted had the uneasy sense that the child was spinning them out as a way of filling the time, distracting them both from whatever was going on inside the house. And this made her seem much older than she really was, a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary, too accepting of life's burdens even to mention them.

People are bored. They're dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I'd drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What's missing? What do they need? What's the next step? And then I got it: imagination . We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

At the beginning he'd thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. 27

I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking into bits. She was coming apart at the seams … my head buzzing with a confusion of junk noise, white noise, space junk, a junkyard of noisy thought that made me long instead for a lovely, petaled silence.

underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

I wider that all the time - what will happen next" Kitty says. "sometimes, I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... Or what?

Well, I'm the guy talking. Someone's always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don't know who it is or what their reasons are.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time. Fuck Sasha, I thought.

each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage