Quotes About Self-doubt

He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat. Do you think you could ever love me? I don't think so. Because I'm not good enough. It's not like that. Because I'm not smart. No. Because you couldn't love me. Because I couldn't love you.

We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?

Julia Bloch: 43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

Dicen que soy un gran escritor. Agradezco esa curiosa opinión, pero no la comparto. El día de mañana, algunos lúcidos la refutarán fácilmente y me tildarán de impostor o chapucero o de ambas cosas a la vez.

When I began writing I always said to myself that my ideas were very shallow-- that if a reader saw through them, he would despise me. So I disguised myself.

Mark sighed to himself as he walked home. The afternoon was unexpectedly warm, the sky deep blue and cloudless. You figure her out, he told himself. You're the expert. Mark Carney, girl expert. Everyone should ask me for advice. I know everything about girls, except how to get along with them, how to get along without them, and how to understand them. And I can't even worry about Marcy right now because I've got a date with Janine.

She'd also begun to feel like this might not be the best place for her after all. "I

Was he actually losing it now, that he talked to himself all the time? Was all of this in his head? But he needed to talk to someone, and without anyone else around, talking to himself would have to do. At

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

It won't surprise you to hear that I'm a skeptical person. I don't even believe half the garbage that tumbles from my own mouth.

Sometimes I don't feel like writing at all...It seems so selfish, writing.

Like Ingrid Bergman in the film Gaslight, whose husband has convinced her that she's delusional when all along he's set her up, the victims often lose faith in their ability to determine what's real and what isn't. ("Gaslight" has since become a psychological term, meaning to deliberately manipulate someone.) Being duped contaminates your entire sense of self.

Isn't it amazing how one small little guy can make us feel so bad about ourselves, despite the thoughts and adjustments that have gotten us to the places we are in our lives?

I was failing to accomplish whatever I might be capable of, a prophecy that seemed to fulfill itself more with each passing year as I fell behind friends and acquaintances in their patchwork progress toward building their adult lives.

Confidence. That's the word that came to mind, one that I would never before have used to describe any part of my life.

as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by.

I don't think there's ever a point when you turn to yourself and go, 'Yes, I've made a success of this career path.' You never feel like you've done your best work. You always think you could be better.

I'm pretty sure I peaked at 15.

I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.

I had never fought a guy before that I had put on a pedestal the way I did with Carlos Condit. I've got his walkout shirt. He's a former champion. I'm a huge fan. I doubted myself a lot of times.

I know that I'm probably far more pedestrian and less talented than many who dreamed of becoming writers but couldn't see the road so easily.

I have been that actor who's watched peers and thought, 'God, they're doing well. I'll never get there.'

I can paint and draw. I believe this myself and a few other people say that they believe this too. But I'm not certain of whether it's true.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.