#intro

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#shy #love

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#positive-thinking #self-help #self-improvement #love

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#introspection

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn ↗

— Robert Frost

#on-writing #reflection #introspection

Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone. ↗

— Augusten Burroughs

#therapy #introspection

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#philosophy #society #weakness #introspection

My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves" -Socrates ↗

— Socrates

#introspection #ourselves #psyche #self-awareness #introspection

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#introspection

What is reading but silent conversation. ↗

— Walter Savage Landor

#introspection #reading #introspection

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#magic #introspection