Quotes About Introspection

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, What? Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you think you love may be people and places you hate.

I don't go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.

Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way.

Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.

You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.

She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.

Sarah'n?n gülmek yerine, Komik, ya da gülümsemek yerine, Ä°lginç, ya da Aptal z?rva geri zekâl?n?n tekisin, demek yerine, Åžey, san?r?m bu ondan biraz daha karma??k, diyen kad?nlardan olmas?ndan korktum. Öyle insanlar?n yan?nda ne yapaca??m? hiç bilemezdim, özellikle de siz konuÅŸtuktan sonra gizemli bir ÅŸekilde Anl?yorum, diyenlerin. Genellikle sadece susard?m.

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.

The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here?

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.

Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row.

I cannot see life, what it's supposed to be: I'm stumped and mystified and frozen in place. Yet other times, I realize, regardless, there's a lot to be thankful for. It's perplexing! How's a soul to know?

Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything. The lid off the mayonnaise, Uncle Ron's honey wine four years in the left corner. Broccoli yellowing, flowering fast. They are all metaphors. They are all problems.

I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It seems old, with too much makeup. I feel stuck, out of school, working odd jobs, like someone brooding, hat in hand in an anteroom, waiting for the future as if it were some hoop-skirted belle that must gather up its petticoats, float forward, and present itself to me.