Reflective Quotes
26 quotes
"Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue)."
"Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin'Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind"
"Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside."
"We are all only men, defined by our choices."
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
"One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being."
"I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine."
"The world after a war is a good world, I told myself. A happy world. A secure world. In this world, I might do anything."
"It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?"
"What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power."
"My wandering imagination never gives up on me and always finds ways to explore what my emotions entail."
"It doesn't matter how long you're here for, or what accomplishments you have, it matters what you do with that time and the type of person that you are."
"For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?"
"Jude used to try to make me laugh, and when I'd crack a smile he'd keep the joke going , like breath on an ember, making it grow into a fit of giggles that'd echo around the whole forest and make all the birds in the trees quiet."
"What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back, and see it was full of treasures."
"Is it not the disparity of wealth that consumes the willing soul. Rather, the golden keys of opportunity clamor softly with fraught anxiety of things which may never come."
"He remembered hearing Karl tell James once that it was hard for people to ever know what they really looked like. Reflections in mirrors weren’t accurate, Karl said, because when you stared at yourself in a mirror, you subconsciously composed your face in a way that wasn’t your natural expression.Marvin wondered it that was true when you were with strangers too. Maybe you only looked like your true self with the people you loved. And maybe that was a face you yourself hardly ever got to see…"
"Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;"
"Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety."
"So now, when I look back, all I see is who we used to be and who we are now. And I wonder how anybody can recognize anyone at all."
"It is always better to be a bookworm rather than being a dung-beetle!"
"If you knew in advance that something momentous and terrible would happen you’d make an effort to imprint it all in your mind, wouldn’t you, every detail. But of course you don’t know. And perhaps that’s just as well."
"Dad was the glue to the broken pieces of our family."
"Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down -how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?- he'd remember that ambulance, just like the one he'd been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, was an X on its side."
"In town, there's a tiny beach that's never busy, not even in the summer.I used to like walking there, looking for stuff.Like old fireworks.Or kelp.A hat knocked off someone's head by the wind. You basically never find what you were expecting to.And maybe you weren't expecting to find anything right from the start..."
"River smiled sweetly at his tormentors and told them, "If you want to kick my ass, go ahead. Just explain to me why you're doing it."After a confused pause, one of the skinheads said, "Ah, you wouldn't be worth it.""We're all worth it, man," River said with a beatific smile. "We're all worth millions of planets and stars and galaxies and universes."
Gavin Edwards, Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind