Terri Apter Quotes

I have a huge ego and a huge inferiority complex at the same time.

Sometimes when I go out on the road, I feel almost embarrassed or dismayed because I can't be the image of what kids want me to be. So I just try to be myself, and usually that works out OK.

When you're hiding behind a character all the time, as soon as you have to be yourself, you feel kind of terrified.

Fame is damaging when people become reliant on it for their sense of self, and their identity, when fame is linked to how you see yourself.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

One thing I struggled with early in my career was the delicate balance between my performance and my identity. When things on the field went well, I was cheerful and felt important. When things went poorly, my countenance and self-concept plummeted, and I was not pleasant to be around.

I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

Sometimes, I feel like I can do anything, and, sometimes, I'm so alive, sometimes, I feel like I could zoom across the sky and, sometimes, I wanna cry.

You do need some successes as a young person. They don't inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don't construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won't get you anywhere.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.

It comes with being sixteen," Mom said. "You teenagers, you go into a cocoon when you turn fifteen and don't come out for years." "So they become butterflies when they finally come out?" my little sister Christina asked. "No," Mom said. "They're still caterpillars, only now they're big fat caterpillars that smell.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

Don't be mad cuz I'm doing me better than you doing you.

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.

I say everything and I do whatever I want to do. I'm just me. The polished version of me, I suppose, because I have on clothes and makeup. But emotionally, I am very on the surface.

Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.

My birth sign is Scorpio and they eat themselves up and burn themselves out. I swing between happiness and misery. I am part prude and part nonconformist. I say what I think and I don't pretend and I am prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.

Now, I've been known to be attractive on special occasions, and I do my best to project as much beauty as I can muster from deep inside, though I often fail.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing. I’m a blemished blemish, a ruined ruin, a stained wreck so failed I can’t see what I used to be.

William: You're just gonna have to take who I give you and deal Paris: Like anyone would pick you over me. William: You just wait and see. I'll have every single on of them eating out of my hand. Paris: Only if you had one of those delicious fried Twinkies. Strider rolled his eyes. Egotistical morons. Anyone with a set of eyes could see that Strider was the pretty one in their little three-some.

I don't expect everybody to like me. If you try to please everybody, by changing your position and your personality, every time you do that you lose a little bit of yourself.