Quotes About Self

The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

Do exactly as you please–if you still trust what seems to please you.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

It's not that students don't get Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.

junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature.

Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.

That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

You'd be doing us both a favor.' 'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.' Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her.

I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.

Evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

Rod and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame. T

But if we can't think ourselves, ... that means we, ourselves, are things that can't think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game's condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can't; and if we can't; we can. KABLAM, ... There go the old crania.

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed. —Frank Bidart, "Borges and I

This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Loneliness came over him, like an avalanche of snow. He was alone. Where he had always wanted to be. You can only trust yourself. There's a rat buried deep in everybody and they'll rat on you if they get pushed far enough.

El mundo es un espejo que devuelve a cada uno su imagen.

Nosotros, llenos de ambición y enfermos de espíritu, no podemos convivir con la selva, porque sólo toleramos el mundo cuando le hemos dado nuestro rostro y le hemos impuesto nuestra ley