Quotes About Self-discovery

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

Sólo cuando no esperamos nada ni albergamos ningún sueño podemos mantener el control de nuestra vida. Los sueños a menudo implican a los demás y es imposible tener la certeza de que los demás no nos defraudarán, ni nos harán daño.

You just have not...oh, learned who yo are yet.

She was now eight-and-twenty, with no idea how to be happy except in brief moments, and no idea how to create happiness about her. She only knew how to retreat inward to avoid pain.

We all have to find our own way in life. It is, I believe, what life is all about.

There must be something terribly wrong with her, Camille thought, that she could neither feel nor attract love. Was it possible that her quest for perfection had somehow deadened an essential part of herself?

She leads a rather lonely life.

But sometimes she had found time to be alone, to seek peace, to seek the remnants of herself.

believe most people live their lives within a radius of a few miles of their childhood homes," she said. "Not many people go adventuring. And even those who do have to take themselves with them. That must turn out to be a bit of a disappointment.

If he ever grew to understand himself, Hugo decided, it would be a miracle of the first order. Not

Smiles did not come naturally to him. He must learn how to let out the ones that were sometimes there deep inside him.

Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground—to be divided and conquered by his grandparents—but a garden, where each person who'd contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown.

Mary Doria Russell

In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it's done right.

Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.

Don't approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.

Joyce's Portrait of the Artist

Words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion - not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

I know sometimes you feel less than human more like an unknown planet no one cares about more like hot guilt more like a catalog of trauma mary, stop trying to die. there is nothing better than looking into the mirror to discover infinite doors. to witness your own bloom. you are the best version of this story. we're all waiting for you

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.

from Hum, Hum Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone. In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean, without understanding. I ran away. I ran away again (from poem: Hum, Hum)

And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire -- clearly I'm not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value.