Quotes About Self-discovery

It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself--rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words.

Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns.

The next time she visits her father she'll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say. But no, that's not true. She remains in constant communication with her. Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.

So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.

He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also—he could admit this to himself now—to take a step that Udayan never would.

Ela tem o dom de aceitar a própria vida; conhecendo-a melhor, ele se dá conta de que ela nunca desejou ser outra pessoa a não ser ela mesma, nem ter sido criada em outro lugar, de algum outro jeito.

Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn.

It's the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school.

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.

My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I'm me and also someone else, that I'm leaving and also staying. This realization momentarily jostles my melancholy, like a current that stirs the branches, that discomfits the leaves of a tree.

He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like him, but because of a past they happen to share.

I never chased after any particular school, never really had mentors; I really just did the work that was true to me.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

In the interweave of mind and body, dance is a mode that allows people to work through difficulties, anticipate the future, recollect the past, and confront the present.

I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.

I do want to work on writing, because writing's a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it's intimidating as hell.

Part of my journey is sort of learning the ways that I'm unconsciously blocked and trying to open them up. I'm a complete "work in progress" in that area.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

Its beyond him now. its time for you to do you own thing." "My thing? my thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. without Grace, i have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.

You know. Life's short. If you don't try new things, you'll never know what you're best at. And you can only make time for new things by quitting the things you know don't work for you.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.