Quotes About Self-awareness

Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)

I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self—your neat analyses and tidy excuses.

whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

What small whiz-kid luster I'd given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I'd read a couple great books till their spines split.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.

How wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - all that glorious, temporary stuff.

I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I'm sorry I wasn't wiser sooner. I'm sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

Let me always be who I am, and then some.

It is the internal force - this intimate interrupter - whose tracks I would follow. the world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self - and does - is a darker and more curious matter.

You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

He seems to feel his own worth, and the greatness of his fall.

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being...