Quotes About Introspection

I am ashamed to admit that I believed black people smelled bad and had low moral standards and that good Christian white people only associated with a few "good" colored people—despite the fact that I knew no Negroes firsthand. Isn't that remarkable? Where in the world did I get those strange ideas?

Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

I'll go live in the woods," said Malone. "You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.

I couldn't not write. Sometimes I ask myself, How do people get through life without writing? I write to calm anxiety, to process pain. Writing to me is reflection.

Now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

He felt as if he were a character in Henry James; he began to suspect he was to be that man to whom nothing whatsoever was to happen.

He stopped visiting married friends. Married friends, he decided one evening after returning from a visit, depress me.

He usually smoked a cigarette and sat down and introduced himself to someone and chatted—in the sweetest, calmest, most amiable way, poised, adult, and wise.

When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I'd want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?

But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost.

Thinking is an art because it requires you to listen to your thoughts and then do something with them.

I know that we have grown apart and that's as it should be. We learn what we can from certain people, then we move on after we've taken what we need. When we learn nothing new about ourselves in a relationship that's when the relationship is over. Or it's over the moment when we're afraid to learn something new about ourselves. But what I have been learning about myself ... whatever it was inside me that was sparked and challenged when I first met you ... is deeply connected to this story.

As I said, I'm an unfinished man reassembling the pieces of a broken world, and I have asked you to be a witness because you would never judge me as harsly as I judge myself.

When we learn nothing new about ourselves in a relationship that's when the relationship is over. Or it's over the moment when we're afraid to learn something new about ourselves.

Whatever that big procrastination overthinking thing is, I want you to dive into it. When I say dive into, I mean, clear your whole weekend and spend your whole weekend thinking about this.

I feel prematurely old. I'm actually having this major belated quarter-life crisis. I'm turning 30 in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot about mortality. A lot about what I'm going to do with my life and how to enjoy it. One of the things I'm going to work on is being more spontaneous, letting go, embracing the beauty of come-what-may.

I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

Every couple of years - no, that's every couple of weeks - I think I'm going to give up acting.

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.

You reach a point in your career when the weeks turn into a month or more of the phone not ringing.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Usually I can go for three or four weeks and then I start to bake cakes or make jewellery and I think, 'hang on a minute, I'm obviously bored rigid. I need to get back out there.'