Jean Cocteau Quotes

'Elizabeth' doesn't feel related to me at all.

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

Many times I feel different like a different person.

...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.

All my life I've felt like somebody's wife, or somebody's mother or somebody's daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that's why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself.

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

When I was a boy I was my father.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.

Sometimes I think I spend my whole life trying to figure out where I fit in.

How would I know which one I was?

I would just like to be real and be me. It's just really hard to do walking around and everyone knows who I am.

Who am I supposed to be again? Just be yourself. But who am I?

I've always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.

I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think-try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.

I did not know that I would grow to be my mothers evil seed and do these evil deeds.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

At least I was true. My intellectual abilities gave me a release, and an excuse. I shunned company because I preferred books; and the dreams I confided to my father were of becoming a scholar in good earnest, and going to University. It was unheard-of several shocked governesses were only too quick to tell me, when I spoke a little too boldly -- but my father nodded and smiled and said, 'We'll see.' Since I believed my father could do anything -- except of course make me pretty -- I worked and studied with passionate dedication, lived in hope, and avoided society and mirrors.