Quotes About Self-awareness

Valerie saw Cesaire's eyes resting upon Suzette's reclining form. Valerie wondered whether he really saw her there anymore. After eighteen years of marriage, Cesaire did not seem to notice her gentleness with her children or her sun-streaked hair in the summer months. Was that what marriage was, an inability to see who the person was, the way that we don't know ourselves because we stand too close?

We are where we are because we are what we are, and we are what we are because of our habitual thinking.

But when nobody punishes you, you have to do it yourself, and there's no release date on that. We're always harder on ourselves than any governing body could ever get away with being.

We do crazy shit because we're broken.

All I know is that you can't force yourself to feel something you don't.

you can't change anybody's mind. The sooner I learned that, the happier my life would be, and now I felt like a happy life was a goal again for the first time in a long time.

Not a one of us can be everything somebody else wants us to be. Trouble comes when we try to pretend we can. Or when people see it like a betrayal. You know. That somebody won't meet all their needs. My mom used to say it's because we weren't put here on earth to take care of each other. And that it's silly to get mad at someone for letting you down when they're just being who they are. She said it's like getting mad at your dog for not being a cat.

You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won't make it go away. Unfortunately you can't insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me. People try all the time. If it worked, we'd know about it by now.

World is full of people so troubled they don't even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can't tell you what they don't know.

when you're thinking bad thoughts about yourself, to remember that they might turn out to be wrong.

We all have to go from not knowing to knowing. If you have shortcomings, I fully believe it's better to look them in the eye. Pretending otherwise gets you nowhere.

Well, you're seeing what ain't there." Or what you wanted for yourself and never got. What we don't get, we see everywhere we look. What we won't let ourselves do, be, we refuse to tolerate in any other living soul. Arlene was beginning to notice this.

I am not as unstable as people tend to think, but I allow them their margin for error because it allows me mine.

And in this one perfect but probably fleeting moment . . . nothing in my life has ever been a mistake.

This is what we do. We do crazy shit because we're broken. That's who we are. That's what we do.

got that when a person is rude and abusive to me, it's not about me at all. They can say something terrible to me or about me, but they're revealing themselves, not me. It has nothing to do with me. They're just showing me the landscape on the inside of themselves as they project it out onto somebody else. Does that make sense?

If you have shortcomings, I fully believe it's better to look them in the eye. Pretending otherwise gets you nowhere.

I think we all more or less know where we stand with people, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not.

She said it was very selfish of me to base my participation in the world on whether the world was pleasing me at the moment. She said of course the world can be cruel; this is a given. She asked if I knew what she would have sacrificed to be ninety-two.

Whatever you think your shortcomings are…you can't just lock yourself in the house so no one can notice or comment. We all have to take ourselves out into the world, flaws and all. And find a way to make the adjustment.

If there's some hidden part of me that thinks like that, I'd rather not go searching for it.

I have no idea if how I feel is what other people would call okay. I'm just the way I've always been.

All guidance springs from an ability within yourself—if only the ability to be guided.

Shades of me, he thought. Did other people react so violently to the overwhelm of their emotion? News to him. He'd lived his life quite sure he was the only one. Billy