Jami Attenberg Quotes

If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.

My personality doesn't interest me.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.

I gotta say, I know my strengths, and I know my weaknesses, and, well, Fix-It Felix, I'm not too far from that kid.

I am a pile of reworked flaws weaved into a semi-functioning man.

People have to understand that they're not good at everything.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

The well of your incompleteness runs deep, but make the effort to look away from yourself and to look toward Him.

Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which cause me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, 'scientific' though. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.

The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.

Ask yourself this question everyday: What is it about me that other people would change if they could?

It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us. This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.

When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.

Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.

If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men's vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation.

Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

I can talk about humility, but I'm not humble. I mean, if you say, I'm humble, you've just contradicted yourself. But I'm trying to be, man, I'm trying so hard.

I always like whatever I did most recently. It's the closest to who I am at the moment.

I've done thousands of interviews in my life, and it's a format that I quite enjoy, because I think of questions in interviews as an opportunity to sort of gauge my growth in a way. It gives me an idea of how I'm navigating this world that I'm in.