Quotes About Introspection

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Until you make peace with who you are, you will never be content with what you have.

I struggle again to draw this man's face in a crowd of faces: which dog-eared lines and frayed adjectives do I use? How do I sketch his visage, the way he looked to me then, at first sight, still mysterious? Among countless pairs of brown eyes, how to distinguish those two soft, open, wise ones, their gaze alert but slightly awkward, marveling? How to outline the lips, nose, brows, chin, so that I can see them afresh, as simple as a portrait on a cafe napkin?

We believe at once in evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad

All the while I was trying to figure out if I knew anyone who had married and stayed in love for decades. I thought about Daddy and Momma. Daddy had loved Momma with a great passion. Everyone knew that. But, why? I knew why! The ugly truth was that he loved her because of how she made him feel, not because of who she was. Was that the nature of a man's love for a woman? Not what you bring to the table, but how you make him feel? I was drinking a cup

Maybe it was what I needed too. For all those years I told myself

How Michelle spent her spare time was anybody's guess. Mostly she appeared to be marinating in a mood. "Got

Something in me had changed when Archie asked me if I wanted Sharon's cats. I thought then that if I didn't start saying what it was that I wanted, I shouldn't expect to get it. Archie got so off base about me because I let him be so off base about me. I was never clear.

have meant anything to anyone except me. So what?

That's what I wanted for myself for even just a little while-to be unaware of the rest of the world. I needed some time.

The most enviable writers are those who, quite often unanalytically and unconsciously, have realized that there are different facets to their nature and are able to live and work with now one, now another, in the ascendant.

As long as you cannot bear the notion that there is a creature under heaven who can regard you with an indifferent, an amused or hostile eye, you will probably see to it that you continue to fail with the utmost charm.

But I came across a sentence in the book I was reading, HUMAN PERSONALITY, by F. W. H. Myers, which was so illuminating that I put the book aside to consider all the ideas suggested in that one penetrating hypothesis. When I picked up the book again I was a different person.

Long before Freud made his contribution to modern thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De Imaginatione—Concerning the Imagination—was discriminating between two kinds of revery: the one retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his man's work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the successful man.

The first exercise is to spend an hour every day without saying anything except in answer to direct questions.

showered, hating the sound of the rushing water; shaved, hating the buzz of the razor. He dressed quickly, not caring what he put on. He had no plan, only to get out of this room, to get away from the unremembered shape of his dreams.

But it can give me a turn, that face, any time I happen to catch it in a mirror; most particularly at times like this when I'm alone and have to admit it's really mine because there's no one else to accuse.

If we would give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two week's vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.

Have we even begun to be Christians?

MEDITATION ON THE BUS. Rainy and cold. Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others, it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.