Quotes About Self

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.

The truth is that all of us have multiple identities -- if only because all of us were children once, then teenagers, and are these things no longer, yet are them still.

Patients with symptom neuroses feel on the side of the therapist in opposing a problematic part of the self. They rarely require a long period to develop a shared perspective. In contrast, those whose problems are complexly interwoven with their personality may easily feel alone and under attack.

Why is it considered acceptable to carve up a person's body to match their inner sense of self but bigoted to help them change their sense of self to match their body?

Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you. —Frank Tyger

When we have been betrayed in our most basic human relationship—and that trust is never restored—how can we learn to trust ourselves to respond appropriately to betrayal?

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work. —George Bernard Shaw, Candida

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

Modern woman have discovered that living through another's reflection is simply not human enough.

A lesser known Stoic writer, Hierocles, visualizes a series of extended, concentric circles with the self at the center. "To be at home" in the world requires striving to bring the outermost circles toward the center.

I've never felt just like me, just like Alison. I can't be myself in this family because it's more important that I be... this person who's not... Adam. Who's normal. Smart. Good. Who's not... Autistic.

Does the hatred you feel ever disappear? Or is it something that never goes away... No matter how many times you try to erase it? What I have always feared the most... Is myself. Because I, too, have hatred inside me.

I was born in a town that was straight out of a fairy tale. Many people died there, and when I walked away, I held hands with my other self. To me it seemed like we were the only two people in the world. Neither one of us possessed a real name.

In her game, she didn't need a gun, or space-helmet, or lightsaber. In the game Margot played when she was a child, she was enough all by herself.

There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong.

I'm not who I was.

Morality has nothing to do with such a man as I am.

Aggression and depression sound like two different, even polarized phenomena, but they're not. Depression is aggression turned inward, directed against the self, or the imagined, threatening self. A seriously depressed person may look anesthetized to an observer, but the depressed person is never anesthetized to herself. She may wish to be, and she may seek to be with chemical aid, but she cannot truly placate her sneering, jabbering, nested aggressor.

the empty-closet theory of the breast: if it's there, it will be stuffed.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.

If you never sit still, it does not even hint to that deeper self in you that you are interested. By practice, by showing up, we are signaling that deep motor, that hum of life, that we are ready: Help us. Pay attention and lead us out of our confusion.

Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you're free.

the back of every word we write is no word. Only because no word exists is there space enough to write some word. So when we write about our feelings and perceptions, it is writing practice when we also touch the place where there are no feelings, no perceptions, there is no you, no person doing any writing. In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.