Jane Welsh Carlyle Quotes

How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

Once I looked into a mirror at my face I felt like it was completely convincing. I was Salieri.

My personality doesn't interest me.

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.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

I am myself a fabulous fake.

You're looking at a different me than I'm looking at.

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

Whatever your image is, it's probably not you, but it affords you the freedom to live up to it.

I've never, ever labeled myself.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

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 don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I know what my identity is.

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

I might not ever fully know who I am, but I also believe that I could be whoever I want, whenever I want.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are

You have not known what you are - you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk.

Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!