Quotes About Self

My existence is the only gift I have left to give, but it will have to do.

And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

As you gain more control over your past and present relationship with your parents, you will discover that your other relationships, especially your relationship with yourself, will improve dramatically. You will have the freedom, perhaps for the first time, to enjoy your own life.

how does my worthless life get lived without me?

I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...

But then I looked in the glass and saw the spy beyond the clergyman, the image beyond the image, and beyond the spy was yet another man, the image beyond the image beyond the image. Reality blurred; fantasy and truth became inextricably intertwined. I told myself I had imagined the distant stranger but as I felt my personality begin to divide I covered my face with my hands.

Sin is when you turn away from God—or, in the other language, alienation occurs when the ego, that erratic, unreliable driver of the personality, temporarily turns aside from the great quest for integration with the inner self, the self that's authentic, the self that contains the potential to be fully human, fully fulfilled and fully alive.

So many people fail to realise that the greatest journey one can ever take is the journey to the very centre of one's being.

The only side I had to take was my own

If you are alive and conscious, you are probably codependent.

Whatever we believe about ourselves and our ability comes true for us." —Susan L. Taylor, journalist

For almost all these women, their faith is the means by which they make sense of the world and of themselves; it is who they are and what they do, not something they have.

Alone by herself or alone in a crowd, it still came down to lonely. She

you can only do what's right for yourself. You can't control anyone else.

You're married, you stay married. That's the way it is. Being happy or not is up to you. A man can't make a woman happy. It's like asking a cat to grow wings. It's not in their nature. Happiness is in here.

Being happy or not is up to you. A man can't make a woman happy. It's like asking a cat to grow wings. It's not in their nature. Happiness is in here.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

I am not myself with people [...] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.

Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life - to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you're in it and paying attention to it. That's what a writer does - a writer pays attention to the world.

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs.