Quotes About Self-awareness

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.

I must learn more about these people?try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, 'Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

I am myself. That is not enough. --from The Jailer, written 17 October 1962

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

I am both worse and better than you thought.

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

Then I thought, No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen. I am possessive about time alone...

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of race.

I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.