Quotes About Self

Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

If you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when? –Rabbi Hillel

Education,' one of R's teachers taught, 'teaches you not to be yourself.' But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn't blood, it wasn't anything.

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick.

A good life is always partly a matter of luck, but it is also a choice we make for ourselves- a choice of deliberation, attention, creativity, limits. A choice predicated on this belief: I am worthy.

Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

I aged rapidly during those months, as one must with such loss of one's self, with such proximity to death, and such distance from shelter.

If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need?

I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. Often the narrator himself would not need to know fully the deeper reasons for a particular juxtaposition. I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person's view of their own self and past.

Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.

however accurately one may fill in the surface details of one's mirror reflection, the personality represented rarely comes near the truth as others would see it.

people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by – as they might in a store window – and that such a display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.

What this all amounted to was that as I was growing up, long before I'd ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called 'Japan' – a place to which I in some way belonged, and from which I drew a certain sense of my identity and my confidence.

Not only had I learned that 'changes' were a part of Josie...I'd begun to understand also that this wasn't a trait particular just to Josie; that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by - as they might in a store window - and that such a display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.

With a strength I can be proud of, I live only for myself, and only die for myself. I'll never die for someone, cause I know the pain of who remains alive, this is my pride.

I had to take responsibility, even if it meant saying no to an authority figure, because I was the authority on me.

If I was crazy, would I know it? That's what being crazy was, wasn't it? You thought you were fine. Everyone else knew better.

I was the authority on me.

I make the choice because it is one I can live with.

The face, the whole body, the way you moved in it, just a guise. You put it on, you put it off again. What was underneath belonged to you, just you, as long as you kept it hidden.

Weißt du denn nicht, dass du die Seele verlierst, wenn du die Wahrheit über dich selbst abstreitest?

The heart is that kind of map. The self is in the middle and everything else is out of proportion. You draw the friends of your youth large, then later it's impossible to rescale them when other more important people need to be added. Anyone who has done you wrong is shown too big, and so is anyone you loved.