Quotes About Self-discovery

The fruit of your withdrawal is what you need to understand as a positive process, both painful and exhilarating.

Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny. PAUL TILLICH

I had a lack of confidence, which caused me to back down from forcefully stated positions; an i was overly emotional at the expense of careful, scientific thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was

If it weren't for Julia Child, I might never have moved past brown rice and tofu. Worse, I might still be afraid of being less than perfect.

But I was made of nows, and my feet level on the promissory earth would not accept walking backwards and went forward, forward, mocking the ashes to reach the kiss of new paths. I Was My Own Route

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it, she said. I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

Yes, of course we were pretentious—what else is youth for?

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. —

Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other -- into the people we should become.

It's not the first time in his life he's felt like a man.

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

Before him and since he'd gone away, she'd either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else. She was only ever wholly herself with him.

Maybe we're born with a full set of qualities, some fine, some not so fine, and none of us knows what will bring out everything that lives within us. And sometimes it's the fine qualities that cause us trouble, and the not so fine that save us.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?

There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn't describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.

I am a woman. And I am seeking an attitude. I am trying to find reasons for pride.

I wanted no grand mission, no 'causes,' just a life - a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life - of my own.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.