Hermann Hesse Quotes

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

The first service a child doth his father is to make him foolish.

The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy's whimper or our daddy's growl.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

I grow old, I grow old, the center will not fold. In youth I had hardening of the categories and looked for the father and the mother in every lover. Then I cracked. Then I fragmented. Then the old man in my soul found the god in herself, not in some Jungian fairy tale but in the flesh that fell from the bones and the words that came into my mouth when the look went out of their eyes.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.

My father wasn't around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, 'Why me? Why don't I have a father? Why isn't he around? Why did he leave my mother?' But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, 'I don't know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?'

When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.

There is no child left within me, none whatsoever.

You don't become a fully-formed human as a female, or even a male, until you're at least 30.

My childhood definitely revolved around my relationship with my brother. I wanted to be different. I wanted to find my way of being as intriguing and interesting as he was.

I think high school's very difficult. You're figuring out your own power and your effect on other people. You look back and see how you spent so much energy on figuring out things with your parents or your peers.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

Growing up is not being so dead-set on making everybody happy.

It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.

It's taken me a long time to own the early part of my life.

It takes a long time, I think, to get to the place where you realize you may love the hairstyle that somebody else has.

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.