Quotes About Self-awareness

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn't be. Oh, well.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.

She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same. (Lena, 211)

Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I'll show you a girl who can't put her pants on. -Annik Marchand

You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn't decide exactly what to feel.

She was becoming the person she'd be for her whole life. Each thing she chose contributed to that person. She didn't want to be like this.

Elle errait le coeur brisé, sans savoir qui le lui avait brisé. Elle avait dû se le briser toute seule, conclut-elle.

She and Effie were already putting on their turtle-and-hare show. Everyone paid lots of attention to Lena at first, because she was striking to look at, but within a few hours or days, they always fully committed their attentions to exuberant, affectionate Effie. Lena felt Effie deserved it. Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

We are masters of the unsaid words,                               but                     slaves of those we let slip out.              Ã¢â'¬â€Winston Churchill

How staunchly people rationalized the things they had, even (especially) if they didn't choose them.

Remind me, she needed to ask. I don't seem to know how to be.

Vera had a stab of recognition which made her stop in her tracks. For a moment, the woman, overweight, aggressive, seen reflected in the shop window, looked very much like her.

It was a kind of duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or do that you should stand up and say look mister why should I do this for whom am I doing it and what am I going to get out of it in the end?

Say things you'd like to hear if you were in the audience. Make the audience feel good. Flatter them." "Flatter them." "Just use good sense." "Claudia?" "Yeah?" "I think maybe I was born without good sense.

I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that's pronounced the same as another word, but spelled differently. My homophone name is Rows.

I, Mallory Pike, am Eldest Monkey.

My mother says I am a pack rat. So what? Pack rats are probably very nice animals. And I bet they're prepared for anything. I know I am.

Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves?

Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.

How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you?

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won't enjoy any of it.