Quotes About Self

replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.

my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

but I suspect he feels that if he gave his attention to a book and lost himself in it, he might never be found again, and the world he is trying to hold on to might spin out of his control.

Now and again,' she continued presently, 'I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves. Like the man trapped in the glacier who cut off his own arm,' she said, with a faint smile.

I remember, when my own children were born feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: I didn't know where my knowledge of it had come from.

The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act.

It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

Não ter uma identidade na qual se escorar tornava você um escritor melhor, você via a vida com olhos menos atormentados.

Hearing the dreadful things he said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.

Hearing the dreadful things he had said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself.

The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old.

perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone's attention.

Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don't take responsibility for their own happiness.

Life is sending you in one direction and you're pulling away in another, like you're disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are.

The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.

Maybe the world isn't really different, but I am different, and I am in the world.

Luckily, voting machines register only 'yes' or 'no,' not 'yes, but I hate myself'.

The only vowel I'm concerned with is 'I.'

There's really one character for every actor. The voyage is to find that one character.

For me, the best way to be as an artist is to be completely yourself, letting that vulnerability come through.

If you're really being honest with yourself when you're acting, part of it is touching the real you. You can only separate yourself so much from the character. Those vulnerable moments do touch me.

You can't be the vulnerable, transparent, raw person required to be an artist, and then cover that stuff up and meet the world with some kind of armor on. It just doesn't go.

Because I've been so blessed with a background in nursing and spent so much time with patients at a really intimate, vulnerable time in their lives, the one lesson I've learned is that you never turn down a challenge where you can keep your creative integrity and your heart and soul and your sense of self.