A Literary Prescription for

Reflection

For taking a proper look at a life while you are still in the middle of it.

Reflection is what most people mean to do and rarely arrange time for: sitting down with the year, or the decade, or a single bad conversation, and looking at it properly rather than letting it circle at three in the morning. It usually happens at the thresholds — a birthday with a nought in it, an illness, the end of something, the New Year, the first quiet week after a house empties. And it tends to involve a notebook, because thinking a thing over lets you skip the parts you would rather not examine, whereas a sentence has to be finished. These books, poems and quotes are for that: journals kept by people who were entirely honest in them, novels about characters taking a late and uncomfortable inventory, and the question underneath all of it, which is whether the life you are living is the one you actually meant to have.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Four of these are people doing it in public: a poet raging in a New Hampshire farmhouse, a woman on an island with a handful of shells, a girl in an attic arguing with her own earlier entries, and the same poet again eleven years later, arriving somewhere different. The novels supply the late reckoning, which is usually less flattering and rather more interesting.

Journal of a Solitude

May Sarton · 1973

Sarton kept this for a year in a New Hampshire farmhouse, largely because she was tired of an earlier memoir in which she had made her life sound nicer than it was. What she produced instead is the great book about the practice: the rage on a Tuesday, the gardening, the flowers on the table, the panic about money, the day the writing goes well and the day it does not. Nobody has been more honest about what an examined life actually contains.

Olive, Again

Elizabeth Strout · 2019

Olive Kitteridge in her seventies and eighties, taking stock of a life in which she has been, by her own late admission, fairly difficult. Strout writes the specific late reckoning nobody warns you about: the realisation that you were wrong about somebody thirty years ago, the son who remembers a different childhood, the small kindnesses you did not notice yourself receiving. Read it for the chapter where she reads her own letters.

Gift from the Sea

Anne Morrow Lindbergh · 1955

Lindbergh went to an island for a fortnight on her own and took stock, using a different shell as the organising image for each chapter: the busy years, the marriage, the middle of a life. It is short and it is seventy years old and women still hand it to each other, which tells you something. The chapter on the shedding of activities and possessions in middle age is the one people underline.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · 1947

It is the most famous diary in the world for reasons that have nothing to do with journalling technique, and it should be read for what it is. But it is also, plainly, a girl using a notebook to work out who she is under impossible pressure, arguing with her mother on the page, revising her own opinions, catching herself. The entries where she rereads her earlier self and disagrees with her are the best demonstration there is of what reflection actually does.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Elizabeth Taylor · 1971

A recently widowed woman takes a room in a residential hotel and spends her days filling them, and reviewing them, and quietly assessing what her life added up to. Taylor is unsparing about the small vanities and completely without pity, and the effect is a novel that behaves like a very good diary: nothing much happens, and you finish it knowing somebody thoroughly.

At Seventy

May Sarton · 1984

Sarton kept a second journal at seventy and it is the more surprising of the two: she is happier than she was at sixty, busier, and considerably ruder about people who assume she is winding down. Read alongside Journal of a Solitude it does something no single book manages, which is show the same person reflecting on the same life eleven years apart and arriving somewhere different.

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett · 2007

The Queen chases a corgi into a mobile library, feels obliged to borrow something, and becomes a reader in her late seventies. Bennett’s joke is that reading makes her reflective, and that reflectiveness makes her extremely inconvenient to everybody around her. A hundred and twenty pages, very funny, and quietly serious about what happens when a person starts examining a life they had simply been performing.

Your Story Your Healing

Georgia Clare · 2025

A hundred pages of daily prompts and poems, built for exactly the kind of thinking this page is about. The prompts are short and the poems sit alongside them, so you are never staring at a blank page with nothing to push against. It is not a book about fixing yourself. It is a book for meeting yourself honestly and beginning again, which is a slower and more useful thing.

Poems about reflection

Looking back, and what turns up

One poet longing for a track he can still describe exactly, one taking stock at twenty-seven and finding something darker than the tune suggests, and one sonnet that arrives somewhere it did not set out for.

from “The Retreat”

Henry Vaughan, 1650

Happy those early days! when I
Shin’d in my angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought;
…
O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!

Vaughan was a Welsh country doctor and this is the poem Wordsworth borrowed from a century and a half later. It is looking back done properly: not sentimentally, and not to move in, but to check what has been lost between then and now. The phrase to keep is that ancient track. Most people have one, and most people can still describe it exactly.

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from “I Remember, I Remember”

Thomas Hood, 1826

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

Hood wrote comic verse for a living and produced this at twenty-seven, which is early to be taking stock and exactly when many people first do. The last two lines are darker than the singsong prepares you for. That is the honest part of reflection: it does not only turn up what you were pleased to find, and a poem that pretends otherwise is not much use.

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“Tears”

Lizette Woodworth Reese, 1899

When I consider Life and its few years—
A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
A call to battle, and the battle done
Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;
The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat;
The burst of music down an unlistening street,—
I wonder at the idleness of tears.

Eight lines to arrive at a conclusion, which is what a sonnet is for and what an honest hour with a notebook does too. Reese begins by considering, works through the evidence, and lands somewhere she did not set out for. That is the whole mechanism. You cannot think your way to a conclusion you already hold, which is why writing it down works better than turning it over in the bath.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about reflection to keep

Short lines for the front page of a new notebook.

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.

Flannery O’Connor

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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

E.M. Forster

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The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

Socrates

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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

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You cannot think your way to an answer you are avoiding. You have to write the sentence down and watch yourself flinch at it.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Somewhere to think

A few short practices for the quiet you need before anything you have worked out can make itself heard.

Meditation for Peace, Stillness and Presence

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A quiet practice for stepping out of the noise for a few minutes, which is usually where anything you have actually worked out makes itself heard.

Listen Now For Free

How a Gratitude Journal Changed My Life

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the simple practice of writing down what is good, and how paying attention to your days is the surest way not to let them slip past unlived.

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Healing Doesn’t End. It Deepens.

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On why looking back at what you have come through keeps yielding something new, long after you assumed you were finished with it.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — twenty-one days of turning your attention towards your own life on purpose.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Reflection

Where should I start?

Start with Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, which is the great book about actually doing this: a year of entries including the rage, the money worries and the days the writing would not come. If you want something shorter, Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a fortnight of taking stock on an island and women have been handing it to each other for seventy years.

Why is writing it down better than just thinking it over?

Because thinking it over lets you skip the bits you do not fancy. A sentence has to be finished, which is a low bar and a surprisingly effective one: you find out what you think by watching what you are willing to write. Flannery O’Connor put it best and John Dewey made the general case. Neither of them was talking about a beautiful notebook.

Which quotes about reflection are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” (Flannery O’Connor), “The life which is unexamined is not worth living” (Socrates) and “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart” (William Wordsworth). You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

Is there a right way to keep a journal?

No, and the belief that there is stops more people than anything else. It does not have to be daily, legible, complete or fit to be read. Sarton raged in hers. Anne Frank argued with her earlier entries and revised her opinions on the page. The only thing that reliably matters is that nobody else is going to see it, which is what makes it possible to be honest.

Reflection

Prescribed reading

Looking back, and what turns up

Quotes about reflection to keep

Somewhere to think

Reading for Reflection

Where should I start?

Why is writing it down better than just thinking it over?

Which quotes about reflection are worth keeping?

Is there a right way to keep a journal?

More prescriptions await.