Quotes About Introspection

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

I'm not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don't understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

It is hard to listen while you were talking.

You get tired of reality, and then you discover it's already gotten tired of you.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for awhile.

You have to forget about the boys,' he said. 'For a while at least... They'll devour you... They can't help it. It's in their nature. They'll take it all until there's nothing left.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank

If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct itand live in it afterwards.

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.

The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for 'there'.

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state.

it felt, almost, as though I were looking at it all through the wrong end of a telescope and seeing things from a greater distance than I usually did, perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone's attention.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

I said that I thought most of us didn't know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

I'm not remotely interested in me as a subject," she said. "I'm interested in me as an object, and my honesty isn't brave, because it's not for me, it's not about me. It's just that I'm all I've got.

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.