Octavio Paz Quotes

The simplest way that I can understand therapy is that we're born a certain way, we're taught to be something different, and we spend our whole lives trying to unravel it.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

You know, Italian-Hungarian - no matter how linear and cool I look on the outside, I have all that energy trying to find its way through life.

Ironically, it was because I was raised as a Muslim in the South, that I realised the value in being true to who you really are. I've just got so many things going on inside. I don't know how to resolve all of them other than being true to who I am.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

I just felt that I was going to fall apart if I didn't learn to be myself.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

I felt that just looking at the world in general, there are so many types of people, and some hide who they truly are. And I feel that every person has some kind of warped identity inside them that they decide if they want to show or not.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

For the last 14 years or so, I've been a fighter for so long I kind of forgot what it's like to not have this as my biggest form of expression of who I am.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.

The last few weeks, it was as if someone had taken his life to pieces and let him see the way it worked.

The thing that bubbles up the most when I'm around other people is that I feel a joy of being alive. But I also am a very sensitive person and have many heavier feelings. It can be tiresome after a while to only do comedy, especially after you grow as a person. It starts to feel like you're playing an older version of yourself.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

I felt like I was literally losing myself as being the joyful, spiritual, passionate, exciting woman that I naturally had been.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.