Interior Life Quotes

“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”
― Gertrude Stein, Paris France

“The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.”
― Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering

“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