Quotes About Self-awareness

I tell, therefore you are.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.

You can't help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.

Lions don't know they are lions. They don't know how brave they are.

When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.

How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being?

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Toast is me. I am toast.

Now I only need to look out at them through my sky-blue eyes. They see their own ill will staring them in the forehead and turn tail. Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He's been the puppet of his own constricted desires.

I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point.

I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

I can't believe in my own sadness, I can't take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.

I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.