Quotes About Self-awareness

It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

If the demons lie within they travel with you. Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.

My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.

It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.

She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.

So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself.

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.

What is your story sir? I said. That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.

Our habits and our fears make our choices. We are an algorithm of ourselves-- if you liked that you may also like this.

Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.

It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.

For a few moments we sat silent, then: 'So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.