Quotes about Reflection

If you think that the dignity of your life cannot be cancelled with the stroke of a pen then I think you should think again.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you.

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

He polished the underside of the messtray with the sleeve of his shift and standing in the center of the room under the lightbulb he studied the face that peered dimly out of the warped steel like some maimed and raging djinn enconjured there.

And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence.

The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you. Yessir.

He was shot in a fracas of some kind. Long fore he married. Come near dyin. So I always wondered about that, had he died none of us would never have been at all and I never could … Well, that's a funny thing to think. Maybe we would have just been somebody else.

We're all of us pretty much an assemblage of memories.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

The actual process of thinking -in any discipline- is an unconscious affair...The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access.