Quotes About Self-awareness

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After

Thinking about myself as a crazy, independent old woman made me feel almost happy.

Then put this behind you. You don't have to change who you are because of one mistake. You only have to make sure you don't repeat it.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, "I wouldn't count on it.

Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, Maybe it'll come with age, I want to say, 'I wouldn't count on it.

I look in the mirror every day, when I brush my teeth or wash my face or comb my hair. It's just I tend to look at myself in pieces and avoid joining them up all together. I don't know why; it just feels safer that way. But tonight I force myself to look at the whole thing. And suddenly I see how the bits and pieces add up to someone I'm not familiar with, someone I never intended to be.

this fundamental effort to get your bearings, this paradox pressed upon teenagers of distinguishing yourself from everyone in the world while taking care not to be different from anyone—

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

You are only able to love in the first place if you love yourself, if you believe in yourself, if you know yourself. Only then can you approach the other.… Love can only come if you are clear about who you are.

Emily felt churlish for being disappointed.

Ever since childhood, I've felt a tension between who I think I should be-- smarter, more confident, more creative, more adventurous, more out going- and who I am: quiet, introspective, sensitive, and solitary. If I could only be better, I think- a better wife, a better mother, a better writer, a better human- then I would feel more sure of myself and more worthy. More deserving of life.

It is not for me to Judge the gifts I have to offer the world, but it is up to me to summon the courage to offer them.

Man is incapable of seeing past the end of his nose. He huddles upon the ground staring at his own feet. It is only when he considers his own mortality that he clings to whatever God or Buddha offers him hope.

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.

I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.

Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought to terms with one`s darker side ad one`s darker energies

my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally

We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.

I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause, but I didn't know that at the time, and it probably would not have made any difference to me if I had.