Quotes About Self-discovery

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside. ... When you're unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are. She's the power inside you.

This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.

If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be.

At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light.

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.

Our choice, as Florence Nightingale put it, is between pain and paralysis. A hard one. But it's only when we are willing to see the truth about our lives as women, however painful that truth might be, that we enter the portal of the journey.

The way to find your thread again is to be still and remember who you are, to listen to your heart, your inner wisdom, as deeply as you can and then give yourself permission to follow it.

In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that's just my opinion.

books The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits were narratives of my spiritual experience. I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.

You could say I'd never had a true religious moment, the kind where you know yourself spoken to by a voice that seems other than yourself, spoken to so genuinely you see the words shining on trees and clouds. But I had such a moment right then, standing in my own ordinary room. I heard a voice say, Lily Melisa Owens, your jar is open. In a matter of seconds I knew exactly what I had to do -- leave .

It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

She'd been boiled down to a good, strong broth. Her hair was loose, dangling along the sides

What I'd loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself

Is there more to me than the roles I live out? Can I open up to my identity apart from them, to the knowledge that I'm more than the personas I create?

Ann was struggling to figure out the beginning of being a woman, and I, the beginning of the ending of it.

daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her.

I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There's a place in you that is inviolate. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.

In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.

I began to envision myself differently, to experience The Feminine not as wounded, but as something beautiful, exuberant, wise and unspeakably valuable.

Knock upon yourself as on a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on that road, you cannot get lost, and what you open for yourself will open. GOSPEL OF THOMAS

I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to. (Sarah Grimke's character)