Quotes About Self-discovery

the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There's no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.

What's that all about?" "Don't ask me," I told her. "I'm gay now.

What if . . ." I swallowed. "What if that's me, one day? What if that's what I'm like?" "There's a difference between you and him," Murph said. "Yeah?" She moved a bit, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. "Yeah. You've got me.

Tell your parents the truth. A knot of fear settled in Ford's stomach. Tell them about you, you mean. That's one way to do it. But what if things don't work out for you and me? Dan blew out breath impatiently. So? You're still going to be gay, aren't you? I'm not gay. I never said that. Well, you may not be, but you sure fooled me a couple of times.

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this." I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder ... the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.

from On Keeping a Notebook]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I write to know what I think.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means…. What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear…. What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear>

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

It takes time to learn to live in the here and now. You have to hang on past the bad times, ... If you do hang on and do not run from your life you discover that you have more control of your thoughts and feelings, and your life, than you believed possible. You learn to quiet your frantic mind, to downgrade your expectations of things and people, find pleasure in solitude, and finally discover who you really are.

we live blindly. We repeat the same mistakes by rote until an emotional punch to the gut brings us up short. ...Sometimes it requires intense pain before we can take a good hard look at ourselves, before we ask the important questions. ... Who am I? What is important? What do I believe? What do I want?

It seems to me that life circles and circles, and hopefully leads to one's own center, where things become clear. Do you not think that we recycle behaviors that do not always bring us happiness?

Fear's a box we grow used to, convince ourselves it's all the space we need, that we like its color, its smell, its protection. Comes a time to stop hiding, stop being afraid. If we don't break free of our boxes, our spirits' shrink, we shrink in every way imaginable. Oh, Grace, my friend, don't let fear, especially someone else's fear, prevent you from living your life.

What would you say you've taken away from all this? ... That running away solves nothing? That my desperate need for a man to fill my life, to make me feel whole, blinded me to what's important? ...