Quotes About Self

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

I can change the story. I am the story.

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive... I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

We always think the thing we need to transform everything - the miracle - is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

But as I try and understand how life works--and why some people cope better than others with adversity--I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream...

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.

What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.

It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

If the demons lie within they travel with you.

Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.

Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.