Quotes About Self-worth

When a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

Nobody has any authority on the fucks that other people give.

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

Nobody is any authority of the fucks other people give.

I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.

There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. Mary

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.

It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that--sensed that they were worth something.

Not me," said Jimmy, trying to joke. "I don't have a price." Wrong, as usual.

But by that time Janine was like a puppy that's been kicked too often, by too many people, at random: she'd roll over for anyone, she'd tell anything, just for a moment of approbation. (...) Janine looked down at the floor. Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished.

Quién puede resistirse a la tentación de ser considerado indispensable?

She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.

The opposite of 'mean' is 'doormat

You think I didn't hate their pity, their forced kindness? And knowing that no matter what I did, how virtuous I was, or hardworking, I would never be beautiful. Not like her, the one who merely had to sit there to be adored. You wonder why I stabbed the blue eyes of my dolls with pins and pulled their hair out until they were bald? Life isn't fair. Why should I be?

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

Whether you are classically beautiful or not, this one thing I know: you give the impression of being beautiful, which is all one can ask. The jewels become you, they do not belittle you.

Todas queremos que nuestro enamorado sea amado por una mujer digna de él, pero jamás que sea más digna que nosotras. —Habladme de esta casa —dije—.

She could never respect a man who let her run over him...

I wouldn't have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean—especially women's bodies.

Suzanne Young, The Treatment