Quotes About Insecurity

Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid.

She cursed aloud and sat up. Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road—so hard to shake off. So easy to get back. No man had ever spoken to her

was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

Because people are always afraid of what they do not know, what they do not understand, the unfamiliar or the different, and

I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion

the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion, which they never explicitly acknowledge to themselves, that their own faith may need to be reexamined.

She didn't like seeing that look in his face, but she wanted to see it there, she did. He was a man, wasn't he? And sometimes men had to learn what it was to be afraid of a woman.

I think only your mother can truly make you feel lower than whale shit.

I don't think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight.

I can see your dirtypillows.

Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don't you know that? [...] Your friends do. They're like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can't save them. You can only drown with them.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it

and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it

Incredibly, there are people—smart people—who think a prim disdain for drama is somehow a sign of "good taste." It is more often the reverse: a lamentable insensitivity to the essence of the art, a failure to "get it" on the most essential level. It is more often a sign not of good taste but of artistic insecurity. Not knowing how far to go, the writer goes nowhere. Lifelessness is not a form of elegance you should pursue.

It is hard to know which threatened the army more: the primitive material base or the paranoid class politics.

Even Stalin's absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity.

If my sense of security lies in my reputation or in the things I have, my life will be in a constant state of threat and jeopardy that these possessions may be lost or stolen or devalued.

Often, people with a Scarcity Mentality harbor secret hopes that others might suffer misfortune—not terrible misfortune, but acceptable misfortune that would keep them "in their place." They're always comparing, always competing. They give their energies to possessing things or other people in order to increase their sense of worth.

If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me.

And what happens when the source of borrowed strength—be it superior size or physical strength, position, authority, credentials, status symbols, appearance, or past achievements—changes or is no longer there?

Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms. They have a high need to clone others, to mold them over into their own thinking. They don't realize that the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity. Unity, or oneness, is complementariness, not sameness. Sameness is uncreative… and boring. The essence of synergy is to value the differences.

If our sense of emotional worth comes primarily from our marriage, then we become highly dependent upon that relationship.

He seemed to need conflicts. His sense of his own uselessness required an outlet.