“I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.”— Tennessee Williams, amazon.com
“It is better to be alone than to be with someone who can’t see who you are.”— E. Lockhart, amazon.com
“There are two components to self-awareness. How well you know yourself? How accurately you understand how other people perceive you.”— Ben Casnocha, twitter.com
“Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.”— Samuel Beckett, amazon.com
“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”— Carlos Ruiz Zafon, amazon.com
“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.”— T. S. Eliot, amazon.com
“It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”— Lewis Carroll, amazon.com
“It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person – beguiled, enchanted.”— Mary Ellen Chase, britannica.com
“Stop giving apologies you don’t owe. Rightfully take up space. Know you have something of value to add to the conversation. Know when to shush and just listen. Rustle feathers. Do more things that make you nervous. Do that thing people in your life won’t get but ultimately makes you feel fulfilled.…”— Martine Thompson, vogue.com
“I wish for a speedy death to the chill girl within all of us, a kiss of death to the malleable shell of ourselves surviving only on our socialized compulsion to people please. And a long and fruitful life to the woman who has patiently been waiting underneath.”— Martine Thompson, vogue.com
“We are each so deliciously complex and messy; what better way to pay homage to these multiplicities than to feel, to express, and to carve out space to navigate as our purest self?”— Martine Thompson, vogue.com
“Having needs and expectations doesn’t make me difficult or some insatiable monster.”— Martine Thompson, vogue.com
“About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.”— Rita Mae Brown, ritamaebrownbooks.com
“He was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.”— Leo Tolstoy, amazon.com
“Study me as much as you like, you will never know me. For I differ a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes, and see me as I see myself. Because I have chosen to dwell in a place you can’t see.”— Rumi, goodreads.com
“It was good for a while, being empty. I didn’t hurt anymore. But as time went on, it was like I could hear myself from far away, begging for permission to come back.”— Myra McEntire, amazon.com