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Reflection Quotes
"An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . ."
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"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
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"Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?"
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"The mine is always bigger than the gem."
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"You know because you've been it, and I know because I'm dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective."
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"Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret."
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"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."
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"The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour."
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"I am but the reflection in your eyes, the effect of your expressions, and the sum of your praise and criticism."
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"Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could."
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"Thoughts, quotes, and philosophies-good or bad-cause us to evaluate ourselves. And that is good."
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"If I simply look at the map that I've so tediously created, it will explain why I'm laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up."
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"For a dream to die, something so tragic would have definitely gone wrong! Be careful you don't kill your own dreams."
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"I'm right and wrong, moral and immoral, good and bad, a hero and a villain, and I've been just as capable of truth as I have been lies."
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"Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled."
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"Oh that I had the opportunity to rethink so many of my decisions, for the pitfalls into which I have so frequently fallen were often dug with the shovel of those very decisions."
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"Maybe we are the wealthiest people around the world, but we haven't found wealth on the road."
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"I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass."
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"If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence-then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love."
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"Disturbing encounters in life spur reflective thinking that jars a person from his or her exhausted ideologies and way of living. A person who lives passionately will develop a philosophic outlook because the road of excess leads to knowledge. Enthusiasm will frequently make a person look foolish, and result in intermittent periods of despondency and self-questioning, yet only exuberance and a degree of risk-taking leads us to wisdom."
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"It is no use trying to sum people up."
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"Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did."
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"Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark."
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"And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more?"
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"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else."
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"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see."
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"Write a complaint letter. Then answer it."
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"On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk."
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"When we think carefully about the past, we get to know and understand not just what happened in the past but what really went into things that happened in the past."
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"Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?"
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"What matter most is to complete the journey."
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"There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids."
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"Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?"
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"When you've got everything and think you've got nothing you've actually got less."
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"And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be."
12
"People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."
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"I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up."
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"We tell our secrets to the dark."
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"The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life."
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"To be right in the wrong direction may be wrong, what then is the wrong direction?"
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"Love wins when reflections win over reflexes."
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"You can change direction if you feel like you have missed your way... Decide to do that now! Go back a little more and begin from where you missed it out! If only you are ready to rise again, you can make a right decision in that tight belly of the shark. Jonah did that earlier!"
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"Most people will actually tell you, traveling to those exotic places is enjoying life, but really they are spending away and whining away their lives."
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"Sadly, so many people stand and watch their life melt away every day without taking advantage of it to produce something of worth."
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"When I returned in the next stage of life, I wish to return as Lailah Gifty Akita."
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"We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?"
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"For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I'm having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely."
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"If you are ever feeling lost or unsure of what to do, you can simply retrace the path that brought you there to begin with. Have you ever misplaced something only to find it in short order when you "retraced your steps? Whether it is an idea, a conversation, or an object, retracing may help you get back on point to re-fortify your position."
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"Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past."
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