Interiority 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 . . .”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.”
― Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

“You're one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Our route toward spiritual evolution is radiantly clear. We all have our own unique individual journey to walk toward enlightenment. Living on the brink of evolutionary change means that new ground is being broken and new consciousness is being raised. Truth is of the essence – we have no dogma, no set formula, no prescribed rules, no false standards to follow. All we have is the truth within our souls. I believe most of us want to follow the light, the path of healing and not destroying our earth, but we don't have the courage, the lion heart, to follow our individual truth toward enlightenment. Giving in to our fears, we bury our “gold” beneath the false value systems of our societies, and we attempt to comfort ourselves with the notion that we have no power or responsibility for what is happening to our world. The reality is that, potentially, we all have the power of light – the White Lion – within us. The very first step is to overcome our fears. Thereafter, our hearts will lead the way.”
― Linda Tucker, Mystery of the White Lions. Linda Tucker

“I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.”
― Aleksandar Hemon

“A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask...A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked / Son of a Witch

“You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain't nobody's business who you are really, so it's up to you what you gave them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long—the care of cares—the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven—and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas

“Out of infinite desires rise
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths —
they come forth in these dancing tears.

(Aus unendlichen Sehnsüchten steigen
endliche Taten wie schwache Fontänen,
die sich zeitig und zitternd neigen.
Aber, die sich uns sonst verschweigen,
unsere fröhlichen kräfte — zeigen
sich in diesen tanzenden Tränen.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“But for anything deeper, I am not certain whether to know the world and to know human nature be not two distinct branches of knowledge, which while they may coexist in the same heart, yet either may exist with little or nothing of the other.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

“...Since in the centre of the soul there is a mansion reserved for God Himself...”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“Mind, home and country are the interiorities of hygge.”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“Rumination is the coin of my realm. Interiority breeds interiority.”
― Gary Shteyngart

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“It makes sense that the everyday experience and practice of something like hygge would not be reserved only for Scandinavians, but shared with other societies that nurture the idea of interiority to the extent that they foreground it. -Jeppe Trolle Linnet.”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“Communication happens on the periphery between two minds while communion melts two beings into one! What are YOU?” ”
― Ramana Pemmaraju

“If we proceed like the child does with the puppy, if we examine what is hidden in things and persons, in everything that is stimulating in this colorful world, then we will uncover nothing more than that kind of atomized sawdust with which 'science' for a long time has been feeding those hungry for knowledge. Everything real looked at in the light disappoints. The forms lose their shine, color, and aroma, like a fruit that someone has grasped too strongly.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“That isn't an expression that means anything to me, really. Make a fool of yourself. How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show the fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn't the fool just yourself, isn't it there all the time? Show yourself. What else can you do?”
― Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

“Whether she knew it then or not, she would bore into her own interior, confronting an unknown as wild and uncertain as any new world a missionary had seen. A place as rare as Noah’s.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Every person needs to be needed, but being needed takes away from thoughts of yourself. This may sound selfish to your ears, but I do not think it is so. I know I am unable to be needed like others are. I know that my inner world would be jealous.”
― Rumer Godden, Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time

“La capacidad de interioridad del adulto en desarrollo se ve amenazada por la tentación de despilfarrar implacablemente esa misma capacidad y deleitarse en la vacuidad. El síndrome afecta especialmente a los que viven detrás de una máscara. Una Elefanta disfrazada de princesa humana, un Espantapájaros con las facciones pintadas, o una tiara resplandeciente bajo la cual brillar y moverse con anónimo glamour. El sombrero de una bruja, el espectacular despliegue de un mago, la estola de un clérigo, la toga de un académico o el uniforme de gala de un soldado. Un centenar de maneras de eludir una pregunta: ¿Cómo voy a vivir conmigo mismo ahora que sé lo que sé?”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“English: "The manner of clouding our past interiority is similar to the manner of clouding the interiority of others."

Česky: „Způsob zamlžení našeho minulého nitra se podobá způsobu zamlžení nitra ostatních.”
― Sebastián Wortys