I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it.
Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.
I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore. I'm going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about myself.
I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see ...
I knew who I was now. I had figured out how to love myself. And more and more each day, I was learning to be myself in the world. Life felt completely different, like I was sipping the perfection of a made-to-order drink that was exactly what I had i...
When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how ...
You say you just want to be my friend. I know that you mean you want to relate to my mind but not my body. I can understand that and will not ask you to relate to me in a way that you don't want to, or talk to me about subjects you find uncomfortable...
I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of...
Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outs...
How I hated myself, thwarted, poisoned and tortured myself, made myself old and ugly. Never again, as I once fondly imagined, will I consider that Siddartha is clever. But one thing I have done well, which pleases me, which I must praise- I have now ...
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.
And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.
But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I to...
This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.
Not the “be yourself” line. I loathe that line. As if Myself and Tic have met before and gotten along, so all I have to do is make sure Myself is there this time. So illogical.
The neighbor's flock has taken advantage of the chaos, and I think that's pretty smart.
Community is about sharing my life; about allowing the chaos of another’s circumstances to infringe on mine; about permitting myself to be known without constraint; about resigning myself to needing others.
Somehow I could lose myself in the ocean the same way I could lose myself in a good book. Maybe it was because both involved suspension--a suspension of weight, a suspension of disbelief--a willingness to surrender to something greater than oneself.
I was that kind of tired you feel when you’ve spent a day in a hospital while a loved one undergoes surgery and comes through all right, the loved one, of course, being myself, and Christmas being the surgical procedure.
I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.
