Quotes About Self-discovery

She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow's plain. She was pulled from a family she loved, and that loved her, she thought, until they took the word of a man, a friend and neighbour, who raped her. Years later, when she killed the rapist and went on the run, she severed every connection to her own life. She was runaway tough, a dancing cat, a green witch, and safe from everything but herself, like me.

You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone.

I don't know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow. Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.

I'd burned all the bridges that might've led me home.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.' I

You learn something or you feel something completely new, when you break your heart that way, she said. Something that only you can know or feel in that way.

her. I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye.

It wasn't until I'd asked myself the question that I realized I already had the answer.

I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me.

It is by making a sincere gift of ourselves that we discover the nature of our goodness.

It's unbecoming, she agreed. A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

This is what fun is like, said Rain, almost to herself.

I love to remember the World Trade Centre walk, but it should not define me.

Well, I'm Buddhist, Ray, and so part of my Buddhism has allowed me to look a little more deeply at people and the events in my life that created me. And I think a lot of that Buddhism comes out in the world view in this novel.

The funny thing is that I've known since I was 7 years old that I was never going to have kids. I always imagined myself as this worldly, traveling gypsy lady.

The capacities by which we can gain insights into higher worlds lie dormant within each one of us.

Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.

One of my proudest moments was probably 2013 Worlds because I proved to myself that I could do things that I didn't think I could.

I've never worn plus size brands, and I never had to because I found what worked for my body type. So my advice is to find what works for you.

I'm from Newcastle and went to Cambridge University and I worried whether I'd fit in; I'm mixed race, so my mum grew up in Nigeria and my dad grew up in England, and I'd sometimes wonder which culture I felt I identified with better.

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.