Quotes About Self-discovery

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

You haven't loved yet, he said. You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.

I told her, We have both lost ourselves, but sometimes we reveal the most when we are least like ourselves. I am not trying to think any more. I can't think when I am with you. You are like me, wishing for a perfect moment, but nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way. Neither one of us can say just the right thing. We are overwhelmed. Let us be overwhelmed. It is so lovely, so lovely. I love you June.

This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was.

you are a narcissist. That is the raison dêtre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting. I don't know of any journal more interesting. I don't know of any woman writing so frankly.

I have created myself a soul, big as the world, that leaks all over, and I have to keep calling for the plumber.

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one. I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.

She wanted to be where she could not see herself. She wanted to be where everything did not happen twice. She walked, following the deep caverns of diminishing light. She touched ice and was bruised. To watch she must pause, and so what she caught was never the truth - the woman panting, dancing, weeping - it was only the woman who paused. The mirror was always one breath too late to catch the breathing.

You cannot do any more for me, I said. Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this.

Archaeologists of the soul never return empty-handed.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

I'll let you explain me to myself—that sounds intelligent and fantastic. Don't worry about offending me—that's quite impossible. .

I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.

What can I do to express fully what I really am?

Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself... We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.

You haven't loved yet... You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role.

There is a spiral, in you, and in your books. Rich, richer than any writer or man yet known to me. You only need to do enough thinking to know where you are going, that is all.