Quotes About Self-expression

but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

Her only worry sometimes was that she didn't look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She'd see a girl in patterned Doc Martens or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls.

Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

Gerrit Gerritszoon, who renamed himself Desiderius Erasmus.

The only response to adversity or misunderstanding is to be more completely who we are—to share ourselves more.

Our crucial task when in pain or despair is not to let the sour feelings spill into everything, so that we stain our sense of the world. Yet we must also take care not to so contain our feelings that they fester and infect our sense of ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes waits the life of healthy expression, not personalizing everything and not painting the world with our troubles.

When we cease to surface our most sensitive skin simply to avoid conflict with others, we remove ourselves from all that is true. When we maintain ways we've already discarded just to placate the ignorance of those we love, we lose our access to what is eternal.

I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

Mi torre no debe parecerse a las demás, ni la comparo con ellas. No se trata de que sea todo lo alta posible. Debe además corresponderse con mi naturaleza.

El cambio de una persona pasa por el lenguaje. Aprendiendo a hablar de otra manera, nos hacemos de otra manera.

Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword — that should tell you all you need to know.

Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!

This sounds like positive social change, right? Anything the revs are against is surely a good thing. Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!

I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole too.

What I do I do because I like to do.

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.

If that's what you're thinking, then don't even question it. Go let your freak flag fly, brother.

When you're at odds with yourself, it's hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it's like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.

People can only be themselves,' she said. 'If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.' 'That is what I should like them to be.