Gustave Flaubert Quotes

I think I was always bound to become two selves, if I wasn't already.

It's hard for me to say that what I'm doing isn't even really music, because deep inside of me, what I want to do is much greater than music.

There's the person that's the addict, and then there's the person that's who you are.

We all have to go through our own spiritual process. It is very difficult. Some people are struggling and they are in their teens. Some people are in their 50s and they're struggling. Some people go through life and die not being able to accept themselves. Tragic. But it's very individual. And it's about self-esteem.

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

My feelings for Ellen overrode all of my fear about being out as a lesbian. I had to be with her, and I just figured I'd deal with the other stuff later.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

Then a year would go by and I'd realize I love the acting too much and it is my identity and I don't know how to be anything but an actress. It's who and what I am, so I always come back.

The characters that I'm typically drawn to are sensitive men who are experiencing some sense of identity crisis or growth in their life that they don't know how to overcome.

It really has become the singular motivation in my life - to surrender to the art and to the free expression of what I may be experiencing in my life spiritually. It is really hard in the face of people who don't get it, but what do you do?

As Devin, the person, I'm very different from my artistic self.

For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.'

I felt like there were two people inside me. I was trying to be somebody I was not, and I was frustrated that people didn't know who I was.

I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art.

I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

Brutus, I do observe you now of late: I have not from your eyes that gentleness And show of love as I was wont to have: You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand Over your friend that loves you. Poor Brutus, with himself at war, Forgets the shows of love to other men.

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.