Quotes About Self-awareness

I don't know what I think until I write about it.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Just so. I am what I am. To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

O mal de origem com que o homem nasce. Nós não somos animais selvagens idealizados. Somos seres mortais imperfeitos, conscientes dessa mortalidade mesmo quando a negamos, traídos por nossa própria complexidade, tão incorporada que quando choramos a perda de seres amados também estamos chorando, para o bem ou para o mal, por nós mesmos. Pela perda daquilo que éramos. Do que não somos mais. Do que um dia não seremos de todo.

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.

Devi avere sempre ragione? , ricordai che John diceva. Era una lamentela, un'accusa, parte di una contesa. Non aveva mai capito che dentro di me non avevo mai ragione.

I am what I am. To look for «reasons» is beside the point.

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and the other.

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

They say an unexamined life is not worth living

It's easy to blame someone else for our failings...

No sabem res de nosaltres mateixos; estem plens per dins de coses que ni sospitem. És per a nosaltres mateixos que som més incomprensibles.

No sabem res dels altres, ni ens importa; en canvi, voldriem que els altres ens coneguessin a fons. El nostre afany de ser compresos només es pot comparar amb la nostra desgana per comprendre ningú.