Quotes About Self

I survived by learning to embrace that black emptiness, and I discovered that actually it was an infinity of light and possibility. I learned that my real self is inner and infinite and indestructible and quite independent of circumstances or labels.

Stop overestimating the challenge and underestimating yourself. —MARY CHRISTENSEN

3. Start celebrating your future by congratulating yourself for completing this study course. If you send me an e-mail ([email protected]), I'll send you my congratulations, along

The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances, is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.

Your work is not only books and pictures. They are but bits of it. Your work is You, not less than you, not parts of you… These days when you "cannot work" are accomplishing it, are of it, like the days when you "can work." There is no division. It is all one. Your living is all of it; anything less is part of it. — Your silence will be read with your writings some day, your darkness will be part of the Light.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love. Fyodor Dostoevsky

every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.

Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.

every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer's struggle for self often serves as the book's organizing principle, and the narrator's battle to become whole rages over the book's trajectory.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.

This is my body, and I am terrified of the space it takes up.

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough. The End of Anthropocentrism?

the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none that I could find shaped like me.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual

There was only myself and the world, and it was I who was leaving.

that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.