Quotes About Self-expression

She wanted to create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline.

If you can see yourself as an artist, and you can see that your life is your own creation, then why not create the most beautiful story for yourself?

Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.

So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn't make myself, God did. And I wrote like he'd invited me to share my true "self" with the world.

Your life is a blank page. You write on it.

I'd learned my default mode was to perform. Even in small groups I feel like I have to be "on." But when I'm alone my energy comes back. When I'm alone I don't have to perform for anybody.

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE TOXIC THAN THE FEAR of being judged? Judgment shuts us down and makes us hide. It keeps us from being ourselves, which keeps us from connecting with other people.

I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn't perceived as cool.

WE WILL NEVER FEEL loved until we drop the act, until we're willing to show our true selves to the people around us.

Everything's a mirror when you're a writer; the computer monitor is a mirror. Who thinks they are so important they need to write books about themselves? Who are these people who write about themselves, and how did I become one of them?

I was creating someone I could live through, the person I'd be if I redrew the world

you down by forcing you to be

the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they'd had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.

SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME WE WILL NEVER FEEL loved until we drop the act, until we're willing to show our true selves to the people around us.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair.

From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart.

You act like you have a saggy diaper that leaks." "Maybe you need to take your Shut-The-Hell-Up pill.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

I just want to be like everyone else, Jason. But I can't. And I can't be like my mother, either. So what am I?" "The most amazing girl I ever met," Jason said.

As I sit with pen in hand, I am wondering, "Just what the hell do you think you are doing, Kelly?" I ask myself all the questions: how and why and will they be able to understand; can you spell good enough to get this message across? I keep coming up with the same answer: "Give it a try"- this as you see, is what I will do.

But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind

I don't wanna be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me.

Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self. (In reference to Audre Lorde)