Jennifer Stone Quotes

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

There is nothing in existence available without payment. If you want to know yourself, you will have to drop all false identities. They are your investments, they are your power, they are your prestige, they are your religion, they are your qualifications. It is difficult to drop them; it feels like death.

Spirituality is not about what you know. It is about growing, deepening, evolving and becoming a living reflection of your spiritual identity.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

One of my problems is to find the self.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

When I was in my 20s, I thought I knew who I was. And then as soon as I turned 30, I realized that person has bruises and bumps and dark parts. And you kind of go, well, that's it. I'd rather embrace it than force myself to change.

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

You get to a certain age and it really occurs to you: "My mother and my father will not always be here. My spouse or my girlfriend or boyfriend are here right now, but someday they won't be." You realize that you need to like yourself.

Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

In a way I think why the Ghost story is very relatable to a large audience is that it's kind of a coming of age story and it's a realisation of 'I am what I am - what has happened to me, good or bad, that is the sum of who I am now'.

I'm left. Okay. And sometimes radically, and sometimes I even shock myself with the degree of radicalness in my own - that I'm allowing to come out in my old age.

We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.

As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested ... That's where the Light enters you.

My mother became a believer, and then I became a believer. But when I was 43 years old, I began to think for myself, somehow, by fluke and by grace. And I thought, "Oh, my. I was so mistaken." The world isn't what I believed it to be. I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

When I turned 40, I was like, huh. I accept myself more now. It was much more comforting.

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace.

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

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

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.