Peter S. Beagle Quotes

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety.

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.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

I acknowledge that I have no idea who the hell I am, and I think that's the first step.

I think I need to face what I could have been in order to understand and accept what I am.

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think-try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

I have no more idea now of who I am than I did before. But at least I know that. And I'm starting to figure out who I want to be.

There are times when you don't know yourself. There are times when you don't want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!

I am still a person with a sense of superficiality that I'm trying to challenge.

I became so consumed with trying to live up to what the public expected that I lost myself. I don't know of anyone else who can say this.

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then.

What doesn't feel okay to me, what feels a little bit out of balance, is when you want to turn yourself into something else - when you want to be another person.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.