Quotes About Self-awareness

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.

Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia's thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse?

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa .

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.

Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.

It's hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.

Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

Past a certain age, men froze into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.

These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist - he's dabbled inexpertly - his ten-note span might be of use.

Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite shoes... For it was my best self I wanted ...

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.

There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.

Ci si misura rapportandosi agli altri, non esiste alternativa. Di quando in quando, in modo assolutamente involontario, arriva qualcuno e ti insegna qualcosa sul tuo conto.

For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame.

Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

Regarding yourself as a highly rational and compassionate being does not make you rational and compassionate in all circumstances.

Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not.

Help me, I can't breathe, your ego is pushing all the air out of the room.

I make a bad mom, but I can pull off a crazy aunt.

What is wrong with you? Many, many things.

DOES EVERYBODY THINK I am an asshole?" Curran asked. "Only people who know you or have met you.

Say 'pop.' " "Pop?" "That was the sound of me pulling your head out of your ass. If you stick it back up there again, there is nothing I can do about it. This is the only lecture you'll ever get from me.