Quotes About Self-discovery

I think at a certain point, a person must take responsibility for being their own person. To look forever backward..." She thought of the pile of returned letters her mother hoarded in a trunk, letters Camio hadn't even bothered to open. "It's stagnation and obsession.

Flaws make us who we are, Ivy. Without them, we might as well be made of plas, featureless and indistinct. Never ever be ashamed of your flaws.

Look! A mountain there I don't climb a mountain Mountain climbs me Mountain is myself I climb on myself.

She pulled herself through the narrow window into the darkness, midwife to her own rebirth.

I am my own tapestry, then, made as I could for myself. Some holes in my fabric have been made by others, some torn by chance. Missing threads in the weave represent all those I have loved who died so long before me

We move on like stone statues. I feel like my legs are made of wooden branches and my heart is a hard rock inside. For days I do not even tie up my hair and it flows around me like an Indian's. I can't find my bonnet and my traveling clothes are ragged and so is my soul.

I declare, it is like some other part of me made up some rules about happiness and I just went along with them without thinking. My heart is lightened so much that I am amazed at how sad I felt for so long.

The other girls in the village never felt restless. Nhamo was like a pot of boiling water. 'I want...I want...,' she whispered to herself, but she didn't know what she wanted and she had no idea how to find it.

Thoughts to words, words to paper. A gift we give ourselves, both now and later.

it was true i'd never consciously thought about being gay... even when i was little, i'd often felt as if i didn't quite fit in with most of the people around me... why when i imagined living with someone someday, permanently i mean, that person was always female.

Yo sentí que descubría partes de mí misma en las personas homosexuales sobre las que leía.

Chad kept kidding me that I was in love, and asking with whom, and then Sally and Walt did, too, and after a while I didn't even mind, because even if they had the wrong idea about it, they were right. Soon it wasn't hard any more to say it—to myself, I mean, as well as over and over again to Annie—and to accept her saying it to me.

A person who decides, voluntarily, as an adult, unconstrained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture, has to face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, imitation, make-believe.

So where's the real you? Huh? Let's say you decide to rip away the mask -- what kind of face will be revealed? The problem is that when a human face has spent a number of years beneath a mask, deprived of light and oxygen, it changes. Not only does it age, as all faces do, but it tends to get a bit pallid, flaccid, puffy...

maybe everybody is really somebody else deep down but they all learn their lines and get their diplomas and go through life playing these roles and they get so used to it they just can't stop.

On good days I felt like a chrysalis from which a butterfly had emerged, and on bad days I felt like a chewing-gum wrapper someone had thrown in the hedges.

It's only through facing the truth that you will be able to fulfill your potential and live the life you were meant to live. It's only by jumping that you will be able to fly.

When something is "off" in your life, you know it. And it takes an incredible amount of energy to continue the denial—energy that could be used toward letting go of the old and inviting in the new. That

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

For who would I be if I tried to be someone besides Jane? The poser of the world try so hard to be what they are not, and yet... how fatigued they must be Perhaps I am not smart enough to be one of them. Nor strong enough in constitution.

Without going within, I go without.

Young people are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature, and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.

There's a big, wonderful world out there for you. It belongs to you. It's exciting and stimulating and rewarding. Don't cheat yourselves out of this promise.

Thomas just nodded his head in agreement, and then suggested I write a letter to myself as a child and address those painful issues.