Quotes About Insecurity

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.

And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.

And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn't afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A

Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

And were they still like that, she wondered--these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of--as Howard might put it--desiring subjects?

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

But the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, among all the various relativities to be considered, age is one that can't be parsed. The style of Cy - the style of all young people - now radically interrupted.

Lonely people are terrible snobs about one another, I've found. They're afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness.

Sometimes I think we parvenus are more protective of the social pecking order than the nobility.  I suppose it's born out of fear.

Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.

Ah betcha you wants some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across.

Here it is just like it is in Egypt—the scared people do all of the biggest talk.

Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession.

I don't think fear can be abolished.

I absolutely do care what people think about me.

Ive definitely got a sense of not being very good at stuff. Its sort of absurd because, you know, Ive done really quite well for myself, but I still really doubt myself. Its just the way I am.

There's sometimes an accent on TV and it's like 'are you American?', because I can kind of pick up on it a little bit and I never want to be in that position.

I was never popular. I always kind of wanted to be accepted with the rich kids, with the cool kids, and I never had that.

I accused a woman of doing something behind my back when I knew that she hadn't, just to see if she loved me.

I think I've always acted confident, even at times I haven't been confident.