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Reflection Quotes
"I was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him."
11
"It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers."
11
"If my life were a fragrance, it would smell like the sea."
11
"He had the blue kite in his hands, that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips."
10
"There are some things in the past that, that just aren't meant to be viewed."
10
"However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy."
10
"The truth has become an insult."
10
"Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more."
10
"If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door."
10
"We all have to live with our past, but it doesn't have to define us."
10
"He wasn't my boyfriend, but he was something. Someone who made a positive impact on my life regardless of the negative. He changed my perspective for the better and made me who I am in this very second. I appreciate, cherish, and thank him for it; and I will for this life and into any life that may come."
10
"Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York - 'He was smiling. I stopped.'What do you feel in New York?' he asked.'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering-I can't help wondering-what it will all be like-many years from now."
10
"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling."
10
"Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you."
10
"Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking."
10
"The butler entered the room a solemn procession of one."
10
"I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb."
10
"There's not much left inside me, Max" Sometimes, all she heard were echoes."
10
"Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?"
10
"One will never find in the waterfall of sights anything else than the Illusion of Life, which falls in torrents on the granite rocks of the souls."
10
"Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it!"
10
"Why does one ruminate about the past? He is treating his wounded egoism."
10
"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."
9
"We were revisionists, what we revised was ourselves."
9
"In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader."
9
"In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."
9
"When I picked up the bird and felt its light weight in my hands, I realized that carelessness was a form of cruelty. See, I'd always told myself that because I meant no harm, anything that happened wasn't my fault. At that moment, though, I knew I was wrong. If I hadn't given the female my gun, the bird wouldn't have been shot. I was responsible even though I didn't pull the trigger."
9
"An invitation to a wedding invokes more trouble than a summons to a police court."
9
"To reject the word is to reject the human search."
9
"The longer you live, the more mistakes you make. And the more sorrows you carry."
9
"I don't understand your book. Isn't every book a book of words?"
9
"But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer."
9
"I care not that this moment's lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt."
9
"The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity."
9
"Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children."
9
"He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent."
9
"The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."
9
"I felt just the way I imagine the shade of poor old Samuel must have felt when the witch dragged him up from Sheol. "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes' sleep."
9
"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
9
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
9
"What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be."
9
"In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!"
9
"Looking back really does make you wonder, but the truth is it doesn't change a thing."
9
"Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen."
9
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
9
"But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air."
9
"After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal."
9
"Pause, ponder,consult, think through it well, understand the consequence, know the benefit and take a second look at it again for it takes a little mistake to cause a big had I know with a deep regret."
9
"The same thought resonates."
9
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