18 Introspective Quotes for Pensive Writers

18 Introspective Quotes for Pensive Writers by Rina Pritchard

If you’ve reflected all your life, then you’re no stranger to finding deep meaning in books, writing and other forms of expression. From simple sentences to an entire symphony, you connect, as though you long to or are already a part of the subject matter. It’s a quirk, a tendency, a hobby you instinctively do. By staring too long at spaces and things, parsing out the unseen, rationalizing with the arrival of feelings while trying to untangle the framework before you, you’re rewarded a profound understanding, a truth, a refreshing outlook or reality.

Seeing isn’t enough; you need to know and believe that there’s substance, a story, a trauma, beyond words and pictures either to disprove your insanity or to confirm theirs.  It’s part of the creative process that bridges us on an entirely different plane.

With that said, here are 18 introspective quotes for you writers, thinkers, dreamers, artists and cynics:

1. “To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.”― Allen Ginsberg

2. “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”― Leonard Cohen

3. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”― David Mitchell

4. “I don’t like going out anyway. I like to stay at home. Of course I do think it’s important sometimes to go out and see new things and feel the so-called reality. And that can conjure ideas. But I think human beings can sense the air and feel what’s going on in the world without going out.”― David Lynch

5. “It would have more meaning for me to hear what critics have to say if their values and their ways of living were deeper and more serious.”— Rei Kawakubo

6. “I work every day. Sometimes I don’t accomplish anything…but if I don’t work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.”— Joan Didion

7. “We’ve gotta move. We’ve gotta keep moving. You stay too long in one place, you’ll burn out anywhere.”— Chloe Benjamin

8. “When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.”― Chloe Benjamin

9. “A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.” -Murakami

10. “I have the choice of being constantly active, and happy or introspectively passive, and sad. or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”― Sylvia Plath

11. “My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”― Fernando Pessoa

12. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”― Anais Nin

13. “I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.”― Nina Simone

14. “For me, deep space and deep ocean are both very symbolic for the subconscious and, as somebody who is very introspective, I am a fan of trying to navigate the unseen, the unknown and those mysteries that live within ourselves…We are of space technically, yet it’s such a foreign, impossible to reach place, which is kind of how I feel about my own subconscious and where my dreams come from and where my feelings coming from—when I fall in love with somebody it’s all coming from this mysterious well but I don’t have access to it really.”― Natalie Mering

15. “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”― C.S. Lewis

16. “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”― Frank Herber

17. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”― Walt Whitman

18. “I’ll tell you something banal. We’re emotional illiterates. And not only you and I-practically everybody, that’s the depressing thing. We’re taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it’s called, but not a word about the soul. We’re abysmally ignorant, about both ourselves and others. There’s a lot of loose talk nowadays to the effect that children should be brought up to know all about brotherhood and understanding and coexistence and equality and everything else that’s all the rage just now. But it doesn’t dawn on anyone that we must first learn something about ourselves and our own feelings. Our own fear and loneliness and anger. We’re left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions. To make a child aware of its soul is something almost indecent. You’re regarded as a dirty old man. How can you understand other people if you don’t know anything about yourself? Now you’re yawning, so that’s the end of the lecture.”― Ingmar Bergman