Quotes About Self-discovery

There are lots of ways to lose yourself—motherhood's just one of them.

For so many years, she'd followed a prescription that she'd trusted would result in a beautiful life. Girls don't fight back. They don't get angry. They don't demand things—especially not from men. They are loyal and faithful and quiet and trusting. But slowly, surely, all of those rules had unraveled. It was time to release. To let go. This was why she'd come here.

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

What it is to be a man,' she said, 'and to have days off.

You were born for this. Please stand up and remove all your clothes." "I'm

Clara Claiborne Park

A man has only one escape from his old self — to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

Qué buscas? preguntó. No sabría decirlo susurré: el perdón la mandala ese perdón que es mío y no puedo otorgarme que camina conmigo y no viene de fuera ese perdón arisco que retumba en mis sienes que me oprime y hace brotar las lágrimas que lavan.

She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.

I don't want beauty, I want identity.

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.

I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.

It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it.

The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.

I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I'll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as life said the following: and there simply was no following.

Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.

The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one's former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile.

What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I'm doing it right now: I'm following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that's still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping.

Se eu me confirmar e me considerar verdadeira, estarei perdida porque não saberei onde engastar meu novo modo de ser - se eu for adiante nas minhas visões fragmentárias, o mundo inteiro terá que se transformar para eu caber nele.

When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open pale at the mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.

É que ela sentia falta de encontrar-se consigo mesma e sofrer um pouco é um encontro.

I think we have to do forbidden things, otherwise we suffocate. But without feeling guilty and instead as an announcement that we are free.