Quotes About Self-discovery

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

How I trusted her from the start. How wholly I gave myself over to my cousin. The lure of beautiful things, of a friend . . . I was vulnerable without knowing it, having never had either.

I'm still trying to figure out where you belong." "What is there to wonder about? I'm one of the Sporting set. You said it yourself.

If there was a family in the world to which I did not belong, it was my own.

The truth was that I'd been spending years running away from myself. I hid myself in drama, silliness, stupidity, banality. So afraid to grow up. So afraid to involve myself in relationships where I might be expected to give the same love I got - instead of sixth-grade shenanigans. I bored myself with all the when I grow up nonsense, but I was worried it would never happen even as I longed for it.

It's okay to struggle to find our place in this world and the person who will take us for who and what we are. Sometimes we dress ourselves in layers that only get peeled away in the end, to leave us as we should be.

The well of my heart is a very deep place, and at the bottom, it's dark. He was my ocean, and I didn't know if I would drown until I learned how well I could swim.

So many of the blemished didn't know what to do with silence. Sunny'd learned that well enough at the coffee shop, where people insisted on talking, talking. To be "social," they said, but she thought it was because they didn't really know what to do with themselves if they had to listen to what was in their heads instead of what came out from their mouths.

I feel better when I am not around people. When I am alone, alone, alone.

Those were the best times, when I was still all promise and potential. Because right now I'm definitely not the most important sixteen-year-old on the planet. Not even ish. I'm just another prebumped girl dangerously close to wasting her prime reproductivity.

How do you react to something like that? How? How do you react when you find out the exact opposite of what you've been telling yourself is true?

We are the way we're supposed to be.

For my mother's entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.

If you were a girl who loved above all to read and write and who could not imagine an adulthood in which these activities did not hold a central place, you probably knew even before puberty that you were headed for conflict.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

I was not myself, but if I was not myself, how did I know that? It was as if the old me, the authentic me, were inside, struggling to break free of the forces that had inhabited its body. The ghost within.

Whether men soar to outer space or dive to the bottom of the deepest ocean they will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they will not have forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of forgiveness.

A camel that always moves with the camel caravan cannot discover the beauties of the unknown oases!

Loneliness is a good education. You learn the things no crowds can teach and you discover the things no crowds can give.

You may cross many bridges and you may travel many roads, but you will always carry your own nature with you! Your nature is your shadow!

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

We spend our lives hiding deep inside ourselves in paralyzing fear that someone might see us as we really are, or worse: We might see ourselves.

Tu sai come trasformare la paura in energia .... Sei in grado di affrontare anche un uomo senza ombra. Perché più o meno è questo che mi è successo. Non ho consistenza, sono vuoto, non ho niente dentro di me.

Lui non si vergognava di lasciarsi guardare dentro. Non aveva mai considerato disdicevole esporre al mondo le sue viscere, i suoi impulsi, le sue piaghe, le sue gioie. Vivere senza confini, senza innalzare barriere.