Quotes About Insecurity

Also, while you go out into the world unconsciously seeking that long-desired security, without extensive experience with what you seek, you often repeat the same old mistakes, choosing again and again the same familiar sort of person who makes you feel insecure.

Children of narcissists emerge from this crucible with a common and most serious problem. They feel that they do not have the right to exist.

Achieving and then losing again can be more painful than not achieving at all, which is why many children of narcissists do so little. Barely functioning defends us from loss.

You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Timidity and shyness are fears of this sort. Unimportant, perhaps, but they are crippling to self-confidence and to achievement.

If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won't be shy.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.

Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

I feel ugly, like I'm a bad person, and yet I'd like to be loved.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—

For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, "Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?" I wouldn't know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things.

I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn't be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

My breasts are small," I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.

From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila's diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor.

They're scared. They're afraid we won't be worthy of them.

Fiz muitas coisas em minha vida, mas jamais convicta, sempre me senti um tanto descolada de minhas próprias ações.

Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?

Temevo che le accadessero cose, belle o brutte, senza che io fossi presente. Era un timore vecchio, un timore che non mi era mai passato: la paura che, perdendomi pezzi della sua vita, perdesse intensita' e centralita' la mia.

The girl, perhaps without even realizing it, and who knows for how long, had been assessing the power of her swaying body, her restless eyes, on my husband; and he looked at her as one looks from a gray area at a white wall struck by the sun.

Cómo hago para explicarle a esta mujer, pensé, que soy esclava de las letras y los números desde los seis años, que mi humor depende del éxito de sus combinaciones, que esta alegría de haberlo hecho bien es rara, inestable, que dura una hora, una tarde, una noche?

Me encontraba entre los que se esforzaban dia y noche, que conseguían magníficos resultados, que eran tratados incluso con simpatía y aprecio, pero que jamás lucirían con la actitud adecuada la alta calidad de esos estudios. Siempre tendría miedo: miedo de decir la frase equivocada, de usar un tono excesivo, de ir vestida de forma inadecuada, de revelar sentimientos mezquinos, de no tener pensamientos interesantes