Quotes About Introspection

It was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more by listening than I had ever thought possible.

My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator

Er wisse nicht, das wolle er an dieser Stelle betonen, ob er jemals wieder ein Buch schreiben werde; sein Verhältnis zur Welt sei unzureichend dynamisch.

She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

I would like', she resumed, 'to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations.

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another's reach.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

he asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

Is it male attention I want, or male authority?

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

She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.

You could spend your whole life', she said, 'trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.

That's the thing about me. I prefer things once they're already over and I'm working on understanding them. I wish I were faster at that - like, I could understand things while they're happening - but I always have to read the whole book and write the entire paper before I even know what the hell I'm thinking.

I have no wisdom to share on dating.

Everyone has these rooms if they'd only realize it. And the most important thing is to find out what a room's trouble is. Usually, it is simply neglect, physical or social.

I'm really quite efficient you know'. He shook his head over me. 'Too much conscience. You must find yourself very difficult to live with

we were ourselves again, ready to toothcomb the universe.

The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.

He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertigi-nous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?

My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.

I've always been kind of a voyeur.