Quotes About Self-discovery

You can't know who you are until you know where you are.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It's not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else's world. To find myself in someone else's words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious

When I was your age I knew nothing about the world or my place in it. I figured I'd be someone's wife, then someone's mother. It never occurred to me to be someone myself.

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.

The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.

I have degraded myself by ever thinking of him as my husband.

I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.

Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose?

Who makes you Storyteller? You do. You are . Go play.

Until a person has discovered and dares to follow his own inner gleam, we may be sure of one thing: he will be leaning in either negative or positive dependence on someone outside himself!

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! from "Danse Russe

It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.

In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying. It gave me an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about where and how to live. I would disappear from the overdetermined, underwhelming world of disco-dulled, energy crisis America. I might even become another person- someone more to my liking- in the antipodes.

Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

in our Father's house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation.

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?' I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.

It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

A successful life is one that is lived through understanding and pursuing one's own path, not chasing after the dreams of others.