Jean Rhys Quotes

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

One of my problems is to find the self.

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 are times I can't even figure myself out.

Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.

For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.

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.

Your inability to see yourself clearly is what's keeping you alive.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

My personality doesn't interest me.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

My problem was I let myself become known before I knew myself.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I discovered myself!

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.

Seriously, these days I tend to shut up in terms of external analysis and DO try to let things speak for themselves, while still trying to get some depth into them.

Most of us don't spend any time knowing ourselves. We just keep reacting.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

Know thyself.

The price of confessing is to be confronted with the truth of who you are - you have to bear your faults, your frailties.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.