Quotes About Self-discovery

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.

I did not recognize the shape of my own name.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

But this delectable creature in front of me was most certanly a girl, and I wanted her for my very own - my very own what, I did not know - but for my very own self.

those... who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition...

My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. And that is hard enough.

Questa è infine la solitudine: avvolgersi nella seta dell'anima, farsi crisalide e attendere la metamorfosi, che non può mancare. Si vive intanto delle proprie esperienze e, telepaticamente, si vive la vita altrui.»

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.

When you feel spontaneously excited by something—a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want—shame is the voice that brings you "back down to earth.

It can be a bit of a puzzle, locating the single aspect of your life that isn't what it appears to be, the belief you assume you hold dear but that, in fact, you've never even questioned. It's hard to find what you don't know you're searching for.

I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that's all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse.

And it hits me, the reason for all the metaphors in recovery. Because the bald truth would too terrifying. What she's saying is I may need an all-new career and all-new friends. p 85

What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus.

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

Haw realized he had been held captive by his own fear.

As Haw prepared to leave, he started to feel more alive, knowing that he was finally able to laugh at himself, let go and move on.