Quotes About Self-discovery

The years have come and gone in their scores of turnings, and night after night I still take pen in hand and write. Still I strive to understand who I am. Still I promise myself, 'Next time I will do better' in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a 'next time'.

I had Hap still, I reminded myself, but on the heels of that thought I knew I did not. Hap was a young man striking out on his own. For me to cling to him now and make him the focus of my life would have been the act of a leech. So who was I, when I stood alone, stripped of all others? It was a difficult question. p. 449

Much insight into himself could have been gained from contemplation of these things, but Wintrow reined his mind away from it. Perhaps he did not want to know himself quite that well." p. 543

I'd been a long way from the campus but sometimes I felt the vibrations of my peer group. I understood some of the reasons for their revolt. Wasn't my voyage prompted by the same longings for freedom, the same desire to get out of the rut an routine, to prove something to myself - to prove perhaps that a kid doesn't have to be boxed in until he is a mental and spiritual dummy in a business suit?

It requires a hard look at what is, rather than what you hope will be. As you let go of managing and controlling, you must also let go of the idea that "when he changes I'll be happy." He may never change. You must stop trying to make him. And you must learn to be happy anyway.

We are all here for some special reason. Stop being a prisoner of your past. Become the architect of your future.

Life hands us lessons, and my lesson was to face this awful situation and grow from it, Blossom. I thought love had been taken away from me, but it hadn't been. I was still the same person who had loved Mr. Feingold and my old aunts and my cousins and my friends. I still ahd love inside of me, and I still had it to give.

Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?

Girls had to believe in anything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

To find yourself, think for yourself. —Socrates

how many episodes of being "not yourself" do you get before people figure out this is who you really are?

No more moping around grieving! No more letting others push you around! No more playing the damned victim! Toughen up, Ava. And if the past bothers you so much, then figure it out.

She wasn't running away from anything, she was running to what promised to be a new life; one that didn't include her husband Tim and the Valley Star.

I know as well as you do that only the individual has the key to change themselves. It's buried deep inside each and every one of us and although someone else can help us to find the key, we're the only ones who can use it.

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.

Be yourself

How many of us allow others to define us and thus we become what they want us to be, not what we should be or could be?

Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.

That's what books do, isn't it? That's why I love to read. They bring us closer to ourselves.

Lisa Scottoline

People keep asking me why I don't return to China. I tell them I can't return to a place I've never been. In

There is no external refuge." Meaning, you cannot look into the outer world to feel safe, to feel at peace. You cannot look without for understanding, or for justice. You must look within. I

I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again—rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself.

She just wanted to love and to be loved. She just didn't know what love looked like