Stephen Dunn Quotes

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

I know for myself, and maybe I'm weird or whatever, but the whole thing is about constantly redefining identity.

I'm me, and the me that's me is me and is going to continue to be me, and it's always reaching and growing.

I might not ever fully know who I am, but I also believe that I could be whoever I want, whenever I want.

A lot of women want to be married and have kids one day, but before we get there, it's so important to establish who you are, find yourself, and live in that for a minute before you become somebody's wife and mother.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that's not easy.

I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.

Carving out an identity for yourself is important so I'm trying to do that as well.

It took me a while to find myself.

The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.

I think that we're all continually searching for who we are, and that's ever-evolving and changing.

You'll always end up filling out a character. It might be with aspects of yourself.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

Today, a young person that doesn't know themselves will totally be sold some other situation. Let's do your avatar. You know? And young people are going out, spending what little they have to try to buy themselves when they don't have themselves, or they feel like they don't have themselves. To me, that's like a damn pimp tragedy.

it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.

i can become a new woman every day until i like the woman i become, then i can become her for a while, if not forever!

In order for you to be yourself, you have to be somebody first.

The search for total knowledge starts from the Self and finds its fulfillment in coming back to the Self, finding that everything is the expression of the Self - everything is the expression of my own Self.

I think people who struggle to define themselves might never be satisfied because there is no definition. Living with responsibility is important, but I don't really think you have to grow up.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.