Quotes About Self-awareness

All the way down to my gut I got something I'd never gotten before. I 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? It's the first time I've tried to put it into words.

I was a mean old woman. I'd never meant to be, but it was unquestionable that I was. Up until that moment, I'd half known, but I hadn't cared what other people thought of me. I guess I cared what Vern thought, but somehow I'd considered him grandfathered in. I guess I'd thought he had to put up with me regardless. I cared what Denny and Bobby thought of me,

Try not to be so sorry, my young friend. Most of what you regret in this world is not of your own making.

How would I even know that, Lucas? I have no idea if how I feel is what other people would call okay. I'm just the way I've always been.

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. And most of those miserable creatures find their

But then there's the other kind. They're not used to being seen. They want it but they don't want it. It's like bright sunlight. You live in the dark all your life, you want nothing more than to step out into that warm sun. But then it hurts your eyes because it's too bright. It burns you.

He's not like the other cops. What does it mean, that I thought that? That I hated him so much?" "That you're human?" "Isn't that really bad, though? I mean, what does that say about me?" I sighed. "Considering you just saw yourself doing it . . . made that observation all on your own, at age thirteen . . . I'd say that puts you quite a bit ahead of most of the adults I know.

People make mistakes all the time. That's more or less the definition of a person: we're a bunch of walking, talking mistake-holders. When I make a mistake, if I was doing my best, I let myself off the hook.

When are you going to learn to act in your own best interests? In spite of what your emotions tell you to do?

If we truly are created in God's image, we must know God in order to fully know ourselves and who we can be. God has equipped human beings to begin that quest very early,

Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

What mirrors we are, set to face each other, reflecting desire.

I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.

Because it's my fault, you see. I did it. And you must always clean up your own messes, even when your messes look just like you and curtsy very viciously when what they mean is, I am going to make trouble forever and ever .

September frowned; she probably did need to hear things which were cruel but true. If they were true it did not matter if they were cruel, even if all her mistakes were laid out before her like rings in a jeweler's box.

She wasn't angry. You can't get angry just because the world's so much bigger than you and you're stuck in it.

It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just backstory.

No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least?

Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.

But the birch tree reminded me of how large the world was and how unimportant was my place in it. It became a reminder: to let things be what they were, to live unsentimentally. To pare away the unnecessary neuroses, the compulsion to be at the center of every thought; to look at the world without the intervening lens of self.

I'm not a marriage expert, quite clearly.

Perhaps there's a barometer of happiness that registers when you've been happy for too long and brings you back in line.