Quotes About Self-discovery

Where I was in the world. I mean, what I'm made of. Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

You said once, he said, that you wanted to grow. Isn't that always frightening? Doesn't it always hurt?

I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.

What a long way, I thought, I've come—to be destroyed!

People are full of surprises, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.

you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as thought I had a right to be here.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the life you have, you won't live some other life. You won't live any life at all.

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, in unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice. It's an observation.

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

An artist's) role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

Je n'étais pas boxeur, je n'étais pas beau, je n'étais pas chanteur, je n'étais pas danseur j'étais drôlement coincé la seul chose que j'ai pensé est que peut-être je pouvais être écrivain

The great business of his life (he said) was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind, which nothing cured but company.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

Just so you know, there's a space that only you can fill. Just so you know, I loved you then, I guess I always will.

What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.

In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.

What is the meaning of life?Whatever you want it to be.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.