Quotes About Self-discovery

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.

I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.

You are still on your own; be stoic; don't panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing GIVING love of spring... dawn came, black and white gray into a frozen hell. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits best?

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

You fool – you are afraid of being alone with you own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. Your room is not your prison. You are.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

I am I because of that.

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.

I said to myself: Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don't know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

My writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. My happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.