Quotes About Introspection

Even when I am alone, I have real good company - dreams and imaginations and pretendings.

He jumped into the pond to drown himself once and then changed his mind and swum out again. Wasn't that like a man?

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

But then, no one really got her. No one in the world understood. Hell, if she was honest with herself, not even she understood.

The queen was the first to admit she was no angel, for her sins were manifold, and in the quiet of her chapel, she even confessed the possibility that she was "unworthy of eternal life, if not of the royal dignity.

Att veta mer än som är nödvändigt, det är dårskap... tvivlar vi mer än som är nödvändigt så rycks maskerna av - och våra ansikten lyser spöklika och slappa i festskenet... vi får leta bland maskerna för att se vilka vi var - och gitter inte leta.

I was a thirty-eight-year-old man, so I had plenty of time to consider the world through the eyes of someone else: yet that someone had rarely been a woman.

Our inner selves exist. They're unique, and they're meaningful and mysterious, even if they are secret sometimes even from ourselves.

The sincere reaction to making meaningful art is often speechlessness. We make art about what we cannot understand through any other method. The finished product is like a pearl, complete and beautiful, but mute about itself. The writer has given us this piece of his interior and there is frequently no explanation, nothing to be said about it. Often, the writer himself has very little idea of what he has created.

There comes a time in every race when a competitor meets the real opponent, and understands that it's himself.

We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.

There comes a time in every race when a competitor meets the real opponent, and understands that it's himself.

Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

As he grew accustomed to the dark, his mind seemed to stop functioning and he could no longer keep his eyes open. Was he still walking, or had he stopped? All he sensed was a wavelike motion in his head, like black ocean swells; the darkness attached itself to his mind, unsettled, flustered, confused

I read this book for the first time in almost ten years to prepare this introduction. On one level I am pleased to see that it holds up. On another level, I was appalled. I found myself wondering if the current administration had read it and used it as an instruction manual.

even when we stop typing and leave the house, we remain writers.

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening. I never learned anything while I was talking.

All your life has been a journey to find an identity.

There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.

I sometimes think the sexual organs were put there to keep the human race humble, she said. They've certainly kept me humble.

You're the only man I know whose brain don't work unless it's in the shade.

He wondered if all men felt such disappointment when thinking of themselves. He didn't know.

But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tneded to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head.

It was as if his whole life had suddenly lodged in his throat, a raw bite he could neither spit out nor swallow.