Quotes About Self-expression

All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I'd left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn't vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing.

When we feel that all eyes are upon on us, it is often difficult to take chances in expressing our individuality.

I had been a writer all of my life, every waking second, and now that part of my life was over. I suppose the truth was that I had never put myself forward as a writer, I didn't like the idea of the 'professional writer'; I just wanted to write. But that was not how the world worked...

Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction; it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space, and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.

The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody's throat.

The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody's throat.

Maga is olyan, mint a többi! – mondta. – Azt hiszi, hogy a nÅ'knek szépnek kell lenniük…

you're only yourself when no ones watching!

A ridiculous oversight I mean to address at the earliest opportunity. Women dress to please men. Why shouldn't men then be in on the process from the beginning?" "Looking attractive pleases oneself," she replied in English. "It is a man's good fortune if the result pleases him, as well.

The only way for a women to get my attention is to be you

You're sexy," she asserted bluntly. "You play it down at work, which I understand and appreciate, but don't waste it. It's a terrible myth that a successful woman can't be sexy without it ruining her credibility. Don't buy into it.

What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive of bright achieving partner. This collective model is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

I love you because you are me ... my writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. My happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long. You've got to be able to talk. Spend your nights learning, so you'll have something to say. Something the attractive intelligent man will want to listen to.

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk

I do think that it is hard for me to share myself with everyone. My introspection and queer thoughts always make me feel no one will understand – except someone I love. When I love someone, I make myself increasingly vulnerable to them – and give them the power to hurt me by letting them know my sensitive spots

The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.

But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil. Sucking up minerals and motherly love. So that each March I may gleam into leaf.

Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn't just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married. If only I can find him ... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. […] A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.