Quotes about Introspection

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.

There I go again. I want. I don't want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man. He was Henry with his astigmatism, Richard with his spots, not only Maurice. If I could love a leper's sores, couldn't I love the boringness of Henry? But I'd turn from the leper if he were here, I suppose, as I shut myself away from Henry. I want the dramatic always. I imagine I'm ready for the pain of your nails... Dear God, I'm no use. I'm still the same bitch and fake. Clear me out of the way.

I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so.

Writing is a form of therapy… Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation

The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.

It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.

The passenger wondered when it was that he had first begun to detest laughter like a bad smell.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think it applies to faith as well. The unexamined faith is not worth believing.

We judge others harshly in order to judge ourselves with approval.