Quotes About Self

the way she felt about her past was that she had somehow come into being who she was without any connection to it. As if floating in naked and unencumbered on some shell

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

I have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

How does one know the voice is God's? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

Rather than dilute our relationship, the freedom I was claiming helped solidify it. For in the long run, when a woman breaks out of boxes that have limited her, when she sets her plucky self free and begins to nourish and enrich herself, her relationships are nourished and enriched as well.

There's a place inside you that's inviolate- it's the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You'll find your way there, when you need to.

Is there more to me than the roles I live out? Can I open up to my identity apart from them, to the knowledge that I'm more than the personas I create?

WHEN JOHN CALLED UPON the multitude to repent and be cleansed of their sins, we streamed into the river with the rest of them. I didn't go in hungry to turn back to God's law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

I am the whore and the holy woman I am the wife and the virgin

I didn't go in hungry to turn back to God's law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

It almost bereaves me to think of unrealized potentials dying inside, the small miscarriages of self. I

My true identity goes beyond the outer roles I play . . there is an authentic 'I' within . . . a divine spark within the soul.

I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

Think of it, she'd said. Some part of you might die and a new self will rise up to take its place.

Some part of you might die and a new self will rise up to take its place.

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster

18. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. * Know not your enemy yet know yourself, and you shall win half your battles. * Know neither the enemy nor yourself, and you shall surely lose every fight.

What you think, you become.