Quotes About Self-awareness

In alcohol's defence, I've done some idiotic shit sober.

Our crucial task when in pain or despair is not to let the sour feelings spill into everything, so that we stain our sense of the world. Yet we must also take care not to so contain our feelings that they fester and infect our sense of ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes waits the life of healthy expression, not personalizing everything and not painting the world with our troubles.

Because we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don't assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.

I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching.

Sit with a trusted loved one and take turns: Name one defining trait of who you are that distinguishes you from others. Name one defining trait of who you are that you have in common with others. Discuss how you cope with the loneliness of what makes you unique from others, and how you cope with the experience of what makes you the same as others.

Not surprisingly, like most people, in the first half of my life, I worked very hard to understand and strengthen my uniqueness.

It's your attitude. It's not what you say, it's what you do, and it's not what you do, it's what you feel. You have to be connected to yourself, Henry, before you can connect with someone else." She gently touched herself on the chest, above her heart. "It comes from here. If your heart isn't right they'll know it.

Try to be all things to all people, and you may just wind up being nothing much to hardly anyone.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

All right then. Pull yourself together. Is there where I'm spending my life, in the reptile brain, this lamp at the top of the spine like a lighthouse flipping mad beams indiscriminately into the darkness, into the furred thoraxes of moths, onto the backs of leaping fishes and the wrecks of schooners? Come up a level; surface.

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

D'avoir reçu les clés pour comprendre la honte ne donne pas le pouvoir de l'effacer.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way most people would have—and stay out of her way.

She never knows when it might strike. The rage. And when it does, she loses her grip on herself—literally. At times, she could swear she sees another self—shiny black phantom, faceless, as though clad in a bodysuit—leaping out of her, pulling the rest of her in its wake. Over the edge.

Mercedes] learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You'll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.

You're not bad ... you're just lost. I know exactly where I am. That doesn't mean you're not lost.

El que no es consciente de su lengua, no encuentra su identidad. La lengua es un importante lugar de encuentro de la identidad.

Nadie es adulto por disfrazarse de adulto. Ni disfrazarse de joven hace joven a nadie. Es evidente que a muchas personas se les hace cuesta arriba aceptar las etapas de su vida con sus realidades concretas.

El cambio de una persona pasa por el lenguaje. Aprendiendo a hablar de otra manera, nos hacemos de otra manera.

I learned to recognize failure.

After level of skills, it's how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult — and how well you can give it right back — that determines your place in the food chain.

I'm still here, I tell myself. I'm still here.

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.