Quotes About Self-discovery

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

one small thing I've learned these years, how to be alone, and at the edge of aloneness how to be found by the world.

There's just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It's not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.

He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn't know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.

I became aware of a voice inside my head. [...] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

tout compte fait, je crois que mon tort était de ne pas avoir eu le courage de mes convictions. Je pouvais me trouver toutes les excuses du monde, aucune d'elles ne me donnerait raison. En réalité maintenant que j'avais perdu la face , je me cherchais un masque. Pareil à un défiguré, je me cachais derrière mes pansements qui me servaient aussi de moucharabiehs. Je regardais en cachette la vérité des autres, en abusais pour distancer la mienne

What stuff is a man made of, who has freed himself of his wounds?

Twenty years old, I had embarked on this trip to Izu heavy with resentment that my personality had been permanently warped by my orphan's complex and that I would never be able to overcome a stifling melancholy. So I was inexpressibly grateful to find that I looked like a nice person as the world defines the word. -from The Dancing Girl of Izu

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

Only as an adult did I come to truly admire [my mother]...for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

You have to be somebody," Lanier writes, "before you can share yourself." But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.

You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word.

They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.

Beatriz Aquilar : i libri sono specchi in cui troviamo solo ciò che abbiamo dentro di noi, e (...) la lettura coinvolge mente e cuore. - L'ombra del vento