Quotes about Reflection

It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.

When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.

but they mean well, I remind myself. Is that ever a convincing excuse when there's blood on the carpet?

That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.

This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here Let's stop there. I intend to get out

Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.

A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?