Quotes About Introspection

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

I said it was true that the question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked ourselves in private, to the extent that it could almost be said to constitute the innermost core of self-determination.

I didn't go mad,' I said. 'Though I suppose I still might, one day.

Tudo que sabe é que não se reconhece mais nesses contos, embora recorde a sensação explosiva de escrevê-los, algo dentro dele se adensando e fazendo uma força irresistível para nascer. Nunca mais teve essa sensação; chega a pensar que, para continuar escritor, teria de se tornar escritor novamente, quando poderia com a mesma facilidade se tornar astronauta ou fazendeiro.

I saw him wandering forlornly in the garden and I went out to find him, since I felt sorry for him by this point and wondered whether I should have done more to look after him. How guilty a man like that can make you feel, Jeffers!

I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all.

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

what is the point of self pity if there was nobody to pity you for it?

But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it's dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition – I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. 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.

Most people prefer to take care of themselves before they take care of the truth, and then wonder where their talent has disappeared off to.

it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.

And if there's one thing I know it's that writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn't find it.

O que Ryan havia aprendido com isso era que os seus fracassos vivem voltando para você, enquanto os seus sucessos são algo de que você precisa sempre se convencer.

Não ter uma identidade na qual se escorar tornava você um escritor melhor, você via a vida com olhos menos atormentados.

maybe it's just you become disinhibited. He'd felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He'd forgotten how phsysically shy they were.

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

that awful human type of sadness.

He doesn't comment and he doesn't criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I've told you I've been criticised all my life: it's how I've come to know that I'm there.

perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone's attention.

no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement