Quotes About Self-discovery

Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I've ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn't the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn't have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn't seem that way at the time.

Why? Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

You don't need a reason to leave.

When you're single and in your twenties, having sex with whoever comes along is practically your job. It's biological. It's emotional. It's psychological. It's egomaniacal.

Yo era quien era: la misma mujer que palpitaba bajo el moretón de su antigua vida; solo que ahora estaba en otro sitio.

Quizá sí estaba más sola que nadie en el mundo. Quizás eso no estaba mal.

The mission of literature is to tell us who we are."—Cheryl Strayed @CherylStrayed

Cheryl Strayed

But transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

She looked at her parents, clear-eyed and astonished, like she understood exactly who she was for the very first time. A prisoner of her own body.

We are here to build the house. It's our work, our job, the most important gig of all: to make a place that belongs to us, a structure composed of our own moral code. Not the code that only echoes imposed cultural values, but the one that tells us on a visceral level what to do. You know what's right for you and what's wrong for you.

my disbelief as well as my certainty—was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.

When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn't have written my book before I did. I simply wasn't capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties.

Accounting for what happened in our childhoods and why and who our parents are and how they succeeded and failed us is the work we all do when we do the work of becoming whole, grown-up people.

It's really condescending to tell you how young you are. It's even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.

Of himself Grant said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.

I still can't entirely explain why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I'd broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren't as compatible as we initially seemed.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life.

She'd kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she'd come undone.

You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Against my will I stand beside my own reflection It's haunting how I can't seem To find myself again

No soul can grow to its full stature without spells of solitude.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.

...inwardly, we're much older than other girls our age. Even though I'm only fourteen... I feel I'm more of a person than a child...