introspective

In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.

If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released.

Self is a sea boundless and measureless.

While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling's delicious power to kill thought.

She__ never where she is,' I said. 'She__ only inside her head.

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.

Where do thoughts come from, Father?__ing Mafferan looked deeply into his twelve-year-old eyes. __hile I may not be sure all thoughts are my own, I am sure when I own them.

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment-a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger's face seen in a bus-a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer was necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

How we look at life depends on how we see ourselves.

Sometimes we get so busy with our daily lives we do not take the steps and time necessary to be introspective.

By not letting me turn you into something you're not, you've helped me be more of myself.

Your actions will always be what the world sees, but people who choose to see through God's eyes will always have the compassion to understand why.

Words are only containers like a canvas holds a painting.What__ in the essence of the words you convey through the sound of your voice?

Creation, in all its forms, is where I find beauty. If I could travel as far outward as I have inward, I would know with the utmost conviction that distance does not exist.

To me, the best zombie movies aren__ the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society_ and our society__ station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too_ but there__ always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.

Memories are truths we have chosen.

If I'm afraid to fall then how will I ever fly?

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.