Quotes About Self-absorption

You can meet lots of actors who are in their own world and do their own thing, and they have no idea what's going on and they don't know anyone's name around them.

The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.

Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

That's what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses.

I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.

This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.

And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy—yes, happy!

When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of the seeming threat the world presents, then we become extremely selfish. We want to build our own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we can live by ourselves in a secure way.

When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.

Now you see, Tom," said Mr. Harthouse (...); "every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow-creatures.

Oh self, self, self! At every turn nothing but self!

It's all about vanity, isn't it? I think it says something about people if they can't do it

gurus who will do the simplistic thinking for us and remove us from the suffering that forges larger and larger consciousness. They foster narcissism, naiveté, self-absorption, and indifference to others, promise magic versus the daily work of constructing our lives, and reward us with only superficial engagements with the

I think that people in the phase between being someone's kid and being someone's parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you've never been able to before.

She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires. These were the sons and daughters of Adam from Cathay to Peru.

She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires. These

Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.

Every decade of my life I attempted to write a novel. But I had nothing to say. I was far too self-absorbed, and now I realize I was writing for others, so that they'd applaud me, see my genius, tell me how wonderful I am, or be jealous of my success.

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.

When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our time thinking about ourselves.

We're a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others. There

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.

Obsession with self is the motif of our time.