Jonathan Franzen Quotes

So many people go through life, and they never deal with their own issues, no matter what the issues are - ours happen to be gender identity. But, how many people go through life and just waste an entire life 'cause they'd never deal with themselves to be who they are.

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.

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.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

It's so hard to know where you belong, ever. You have to be yourself and let yourself fall wherever you fall.

Standing alone,eager to just believe,it's good enough to be what you really are,but in your heart,uncertainty forever lies,and you'll always be,somewhere on the outside.

I just didn't know where I fit in - I didn't seem to fit in my parent's generation. I didn't seem to fit in my own generation. Little by little, this took me into a spiritual search for understanding; a search for meaning and fulfillment.

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.

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

My life has changed. I'm not walking around any more wishing I wasn't me, which was the case at one time.

A lot of people come to L.A. looking for something. What I came here for, I realize now, is to be okay with myself.

My whole life has been about figuring out the balance between knowing who I am and being who I am and accepting that people will come to me with all sorts of preconceptions.

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

You're as sick as your secrets, and my whole life was a secret, so it's just... it's been really healing, and I've found a lot of inner peace by just owning everything and moving forward from there.

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 think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.

You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script.

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.

Alone, there is only the person inside. I've grown to like her better than the stuck-up husk of me. Alone, there is no perfect daughter, no gifted high school junior, no Kristina Georgia Snow. There is only Bree." (Ellen Hopkins)

The image I'd had of myself as a child was someone I'd never be, and it was only recently that I realized it was okay to be who I was. - Cat

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.