Quotes About Introspection

Would you like to know your fatal flaw?' Eddie flushed with annoyance. He could have easily made a list of Hochman's flaws, enough to fill several pages. Still, he was curious. 'Please do tell.' 'You judge what you don't understand.

Why should you not speak to me / And why should I not speak to you?

felt a sort of joy I'd never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.

Maybe," she said to Pauline, not looking at her, just turning her head a bit to speak to her from across the aisle and over her shoulder. Not whispering either. "Maybe it was just the wind.

Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set. And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and slowly shaking her big head. "You are naïve," she said, as if confirming something she had already spent a good deal of time discussing, elsewhere. "You really are." Mary shrugged. "I suppose. But that wind was making everyone tear up.

His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning, woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting decades.

Hold it against the good I've done, she prayed. We'll sort it out when I see You.

it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life.

Who can know the heart of a man?

she belittles her feelings to protect herself, and either does not become aware of them at all, or does so only several days after they have already passed.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

One of our most vital functions is an ability to listen to the true story of our own lives. Accordingly, the central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a very early age.

I want to know who I am, why I was born, why right now, why here in Germany, why as the child of my parents, who understand nothing about me. Why am I alive? What am I doing here? I'm glad that since those exchanges with Nina I don't have to hide all these questions behind my anorexia. I want to look for a way of finding answers to my questions and of living in peace with my own self. November 3, 1997

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.