Quotes about Reflection

Make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don't recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.

You could say the place had a pious atmosphere. It was an atmosphere that I finally had to think about, and when I thought about it I had to admit that I could not get comfortable in it; I could not breathe a full breath in it.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.