Quotes About Self

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.

Even when she was dressed up she didn't look like a chosen person.

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.

Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream.

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

No aceptaría la tiranía del nosotros, la cháchara del nosotros y todo lo que el nosotros quiere volcarte encima.

Conflictul interior al evreilor care vor s? se confunde cu ceilalÈ›i È™i, în acelaÈ™i timp, s? ias? în eviden??, care insist? c? sînt diferiÈ›i È™i care insist? c? nu sînt cu nimic diferiÈ›i...

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

the depressed person was frightened for herself, for as it were "[her]self "—i.e. for her own so-called "character" or "spirit" or as it were "soul

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. That

There is no one who desires and nothing desirable in itself. There is only the force of desire as a cosmic power that stimulates all creatures into action. Honor the power of desire as a spiritual force and desire the highest for yourself and for everyone, letting go of all lesser wants.

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God. John Calvin wrote, "Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves."3

The self that begins the spiritual journey is the self of our own creation, the self we thought ourselves to be. This is the self that dies on the journey. The self that arrives is the self that was loved into existence by Divine Love. This is the person we were destined from eternity to become—the I that is hidden in the "I AM.

Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

The only thing we should seek in prayer is God. When we focus on how we are doing or what we are getting out of prayer, we have taken our eyes off God and put them back on our self.

Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.

If I am a homosexual, then I am that way by choice.

I'm the only person who exists in my world—but isn't it that way for all of us?

How can we run away with you when it's us you've been running away from all this time?

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Gallimard: You have to do what I say! I'm conjuring you up in my mind! Song: Rene, I've never done what you've said. Why should it be any different in your mind?