Quotes About Insecurity

We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you.

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.

I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.

They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.

I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.

I don't think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.

I hadn't grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I

I recognized that in running for Congress I'd been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not.

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we're uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we're good at.

was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

I didn't seem threatened, as they were, by the idea that the rest of the world was catching up to us.

She had waited for the stab of jealousy the first time she heard the name, had braced for the squeeze in her chest, the heaviness in the pit of her stomach, the things any red-blooded wife should feel.

Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the "lonely salesman" once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.

Jenny froze...cut by an unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy of her youth toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled her from learning from those more powerful.

When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.

Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall

Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed. - Miss Annie, pg. 424

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer? To be a writer, you need readers. I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?

it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

It's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road—so hard to shake off. So easy to get back.