Quotes about Reflection

Sister Hinckley and I are learning that the so-called golden years are laced with lead.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.

Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.

Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.