Quotes About Self-discovery

The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog.

Don't you wonder who you'd be without the clade? Without Judicial Recon? Without rightminding?

Even though he'd told himself all these things for years—over and over again, in fact, ad nauseum, in fact, world without end, amen, amen, in fact—hadn't he proved just the opposite to himself over the past month and a half?

None of us can know what we are capable of until we are tested.

it was easier to be angry than to examine why

There were some parts of himself that he would probably never find because he dared not go looking for them in the shadows where she had cast them.

She had become an expert at wearing masks, so much so that sometimes it was difficult to find her true self beneath the layers:

Non sono più la ragazza di un tempo. Non lo sono più. Sono più forte senza di lui. Sono più forte perché mi ha spezzato il cuore. E non gli permetterò di farlo ancora

So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless

Both within the family and without, our sisters hold up our mirrors: our images of who we are and of who we can dare to be.

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-eighths that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.

You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you - like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually.

I am smiling in pictures without you..It might be a smile that does not reach my eyes just yet, but it's a smile and that is enough for now.

The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

Wandering down the street in an aimless sort of way, cold too, in a dress from last night that made young men stop and stare in the street, Charity Hill found herself hating the single life for the very first time.

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beuty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

That is what happens when you put your soul in charge of your life. You dare to claim the sky. That sky is different for everyone. For one person, maybe the sky is having a baby, being a parent, growing a family. But for another it's never having kids; it's traveling the globe; it's saving the world... You know your sky. And if you don't, it's because you haven't listened closely enough.

Being true to that self involves sifting through the layers of bad advice and unreasonable expectations of others. It requires seeing through your own delusions of grandeur or your fear of failure or your impostor syndrome or your conviction that there is something uniquely and obviously screwed up about your particular self.

the man was right: It was time for me to find out what I really wanted—not what my husband wanted, not what I thought my children needed, not what my parents expected, not what society said was good or bad. It was time for me to step boldly into the fullness of life, with all of its dangers and all of its promises. Remaining tight in a bud had become a kind of death. The time had come to blossom.