Quotes about Reflection

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture book had stopped and had said, 'Look. This is the truth.

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself...

Knitting is the saving of life.

How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre.

We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.

Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do?

Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence.