Quotes About Self-discovery

I wasn't wearing war paint. But that didn't matter. I didn't need war paint. I was a different person than I had been, back then.

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it.

In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.

If, however, we take the story as a metaphor for the journey of the writer/artist, perhaps it is telling us that a time comes when we must take what we have learned, but go on without our parents, our teachers, our mentors, those who first showed us the way. We must go beyond at least some of our companions. And that necessary individuation—that breaking free—is sometimes very hard, sometimes even psychologically violent.

And it was easier to have an unrequited love than to get all fussed and dressed and go out on dates every Saturday with men she was never going to fall in love with. So she'd quit dating, quit dressing up—and on the whole she was happier than she'd been before.

What do you want then?" I asked. "I don't know all of it yet." William tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, and spread his arms wide. "But I want – first, I want to be me. And then I want to do something large. Something as large as all that country out there that people are settling. Even if I'm not a double seventh.

Individually we have ever-increasing freedom to choose our own path on life's journey.

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

Looking not for "a self," that thing modernity keeps saying we're looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

Was it love or wasn't it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn't even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.

The dethronement of a male God was a crucial task on my journey. My imagination, intellect, and vision were freed of the shackles of a lifetime as his words and images were exorcised from my mind, heart and body.

Everything you've longed for "out there" is already within you. The path to authenticity travels through your own heart, mind, body, and spirit.

A woman discovers the way home to herself in a quiet descent into the richness of her own life. In the descent, she reunites with her essential self and natural resources.

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.

Sometimes you think you know more than you really do—people, events, things that are true and things that are not. Sometimes you think you know yourself. But then, surprise, it is someone else who shows you what is really there, like the truth a photograph shows.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

You're Joe Spain's beautiful daughter. That's why you came back home- to finally discover every part of that truth.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts.

All I could do was think. You try doing nothing but thinking for a few months. It's a very useful exercise for shaking some of the chaff out of your life.

My strength was returning as we went on. It occurred to me then that it was in times of struggle that I found the best parts of myself-courage, loyalty, an unexpected peace- and I always discovered what I needed to break through and go on.

Oh, Oiseau, you want Independence, but that idea weighs you down like handcuffs. First, be free before the idea. Then: make a list of the things in your head and in your stomach that chain you up. That's where it starts, that struggle of yours...

We are constantly distilling our selves out of ourselves like fountains that gush from underground wellsprings, flash briefly in the sun, and return to their source.

We are more like a many-faceted whole, and it is our task in the course of a lifetime to realize each facet of our selves - a journey that is more likely to be downward, circular, and labyrinthine than upward, onward, and straight.

Walt Whitman: I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.