Quotes About Self-awareness

I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.

I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.

This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.

No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.   I

But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made.

All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

I've often wondered," I said. "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" She leaned back, puzzled. "I can't say I've given it any thought," she said. "Since God did not make me an animal." "Indulge me," I said. "For instance: fox or cat?" ... Obviously I was both, since—unlike many—here I still am. I still have a bag of tricks. And I'm still high in the tree.

Her strongest prison is of her own construct.

He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly.

I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes. 'You have a rich inner life,' says Tony firmly. 'More than most.

I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

I find the entrance to the women's washroom...There's a rest area, gently lit in pinkish tones, with several easy chairs and a sofa, in a lime-green bamboo-shoot print, with a wall clock above it in a gold filigree frame. Here they haven't removed the mirror, there's a long one opposite the sofa. You need to know, here, what you look like.

Not me," said Jimmy, trying to joke. "I don't have a price." Wrong, as usual.

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? —

But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.

I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I'm a good person. She could have been dying. No one else stopped. I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory.

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

Backward glances are not encouraged.