Quotes About Self-discovery

The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right—and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know what I want,' she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek, but a part of the divine core of each of us, which we must reveal.

Through them, I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.

Where once I'd felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.

I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely

Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws – the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.

I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely           Lights

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

The name's Obama. Where do I belong?

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't, end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe

I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though

I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant

It felt sometimes as if I'd been caught in a tide, carried along by the current of other people's expectations before I'd clearly defined my own.

It was my compass; a direction I could point myself in every day and say this is who I am now, this is what I do. The store is your compass.

The journey in between what you once were and who you are now becoming is where the dance of life takes place.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." — Gospel of Thomas

It was doubtless true," she later wrote "that I was 'Weary of myself and sick of asking What I am and what I ought to be.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.