Quotes About Self-discovery

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

Consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions

To free themselves of this compulsion they need to be able to share their feelings with someone—they need the experience of being listened to, understood, taken seriously, of no longer having to hide. Only then will they know that this is the nourishment they have been searching for all their lives.

Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self.

One of our most vital functions is an ability to listen to the true story of our own lives. Accordingly, the central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a very early age.

I want to know who I am, why I was born, why right now, why here in Germany, why as the child of my parents, who understand nothing about me. Why am I alive? What am I doing here? I'm glad that since those exchanges with Nina I don't have to hide all these questions behind my anorexia. I want to look for a way of finding answers to my questions and of living in peace with my own self. November 3, 1997

What these adults need then is an enlightened witness who can accompany them on the road to their own truth, help them embark on a process in the course of which they will finally permit themselves the always-wanted but always-denied things: trust, respect, and love for themselves. We must abandon the expectation that someday the parents will give us what they withheld in childhood. This

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

I have been incredibly lucky, he said. Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They'd say I hadn't stuck with anything, or that I hadn't made any money. They'd say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that's not true. I heard the call, he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box.

To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.

Takich okresów nie tyle siÄ™ ?aÅ'owaÅ'o, ile siÄ™ je skreÅ›laÅ'o. I wydawaÅ'o mi siÄ™, ?e teraz jakaÅ› cz??? mnie - chora cz???? - zostaÅ'a skreÅ›lona. (...) ZahibernowaÅ'am siÄ™ i wegetowaÅ'am w postaci dawnego ja: upartego jak osioÅ', niekobiecego, nieracjonalnie skrytego. (...) Nie byÅ'am dziwolÄ…giem. ByÅ'am normalna.

What made you wanted was nothing you did, it was something that you had, and how could you ever tell whether you had it?

How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it a secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home? She had put billboards and roads between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that would make him disappear?

Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.

I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.

She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I

Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

The writer ended with a line from Eudora Welty: "All serious daring starts from within.

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.

Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And some-times it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for l. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, Lord. Feeling like shit.