Quotes About Self-perception

The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her.

And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?

I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.

I kept my age quiet for a good few years. I didn't see it as a positive. I worked remotely, so I just didn't tell people.

I label Derek an idiot, I label Bridgette an overachieving priss-butt, I label Arfie a dog, and I label myself the beef in a SooperSlider.

MIRRORING Out of this will come a person who is going to have a good image of herself. Someone who will be able to walk into rooms without undue shyness, believe that other people like her, accept praise for her work as due, and smile at the nice reflection of herself in other people's eyes just as she smiles back at what she sees in the mirror. – Nancy Friday

Once you have a diagnosis, you must make several important decisions—not just regarding your treatment, although those choices are most important, but about your work, your finances, your family responsibilities, and the way in which a brain tumor will affect your perception of yourself and your relationships.

I actually grew fond of her in a nastily superior kind of way. For she was so completely artless and optimistic and clueless, she didn't care that she smelled bad or was fat or wore clothes unlike everyone else's, she had some weird disconnect with life that kept her constantly bubbling, and you knew she would go blithely through her long horribly boring life thinking every thing was just swell (the opposite of me).

In Fuling I was always extremely conscious of my appearance, because every day I was confronted by the ways in which I looked different from the locals, but now in these desert towns I saw people with noses and hair and eyes like mine. For the first time I realized the full importance of race, not just in the way it divided people, but also in the sense of feeling a link to those who looked like you.

And Samuel said, “Although you were once small in your own eyes, have you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The LORD anointed you king over Israel

My breath is repulsive to my wife, and I am loathsome to my own family.

The pride of your heart has deceived you, O dwellers in the clefts of the rocks whose habitation is the heights, who say in your heart, ëWho can bring me down to the ground?í