Quotes About Introspection

The idea of suggesting that Strike stop lying to the women in his life occurred only to be dismissed, on the basis that the resolutions to stop smoking, lose weight and exercise were enough personal improvement to be getting on with.

Why do people do this?' 'Blog, you mean? I don't know ... didn't someone once say the unexamined life isn't worth living?' 'Yeah, Plato,' said Strike, 'but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it.

People change in ten years,' the therapist had responded. 'Why does it have to be a question of you being mistaken in Matthew? Perhaps it's simply that you've both changed?

Look me in the eye and tell me you've loved anyone, since, like you loved me." "No I haven't," he said, "and thank fuck for that.

He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he'd had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He'd sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

Maybe (she was deliberately inflaming her own resentment now, and she knew it)

She'd spent nearly half her life with Matthew, and not until a hard, bright diamond ear stud had appeared in their bed had she realized that he was living a life apart, and was not, and perhaps never had been, the man she thought she knew.

If you're going to treat me like some piece of special-occasion china that gets taken out when you don't think I'll get hurt, we're—we're doomed.

He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he'd never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness.

We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack: Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly. We see the things we do not yearn to see Around us: and what see we glancing back? Christina Rossetti Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets

The guilt that had tumbled from Strike seemed to have fallen heavily into her own lap.

The thing he'd been trying for years not to look at, and not to name, had stepped out of the dark corner where he'd attempted to keep it, and Strike knew there was no longer any way of denying its existence.

How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever? She would remember this room for a long time, and she gazed around it now, with the aim of fixing it in her mind, thereby trying to ignore the sadness, the shame and the pain that burned and twisted inside her.

Strike se dio cuenta de que estaba asistiendo a una crisis unilateral

She couldn't help but feel a certain vicarious embarrassment.

Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.

I've simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse- when people talk about their faith, I can't connect with what they're talking about. This isn't a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I'm just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds and not music. I suppose my religion is reading.

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.

Learn your own faults and vices; but do not assume that all of them should be eradicated. Sometimes, like beasts serving a greater master, they provide necessary balance and thus deserve indulgence; sometimes they are the indivisible shadows of virtues themselves.

I don't have all the answers. (...) Let me be really clear about that.

Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.

When it is bad… I go into the night and the night eats me

There is no art without contemplation.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.