Quotes About Self-awareness

I decided in high school that I wasn't going to get married too soon. I'd forgotten that you can also wait too long, and then the only candies left in the box are the squished ones, rejected for their questionable insides. And if I'm honest, I'd have to count myself among those with questionable insides.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in. But you don't have to let them all out.

Well, I was just going to say that it seems one of the things you have to do in order to finally grow up is to let that what-my-parents-did-to-me stuff go.

You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their story-telling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren't good people - at least not for me.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in, but you don't have to let them all out. That's the crux of it.

In a way, it is as if your refusal to forgive is too much a part of you for you to lose it. Who would you be without it? Not yourself.

I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I've got in there so far. See it. Think what it means. I always need to come back to being alone for awhile.

We are meant to use what we have, whatever it is. We are meant to be less mindful of our insides, more outwardly directed.

You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.

The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached.

The problem for me is that I can't ever really see who Gregory is, any more than I can see what a mirror by itself looks like, because he reflects whoever's around him.

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.

You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.

She said: "We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Own your disappointment, acknowledge it for what it is, and move on.

All I could say was, I don't know what to do. I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.