Mary E. Pearson Quotes

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

Often we lose our identity trying to please or placate others.

Without Mona, Hanna felt like a great outfit without matching accessories, a screw-driver that was all orange juice and no vodka, and an iPod without headphones. She just felt wrong.

Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren't my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

While you have people who are actually fronting for your needs and wants, sometimes your needs and wants may not be right for you. The people around you are just trying to keep their jobs.

There's a certain balance between finding an opportunity to do what you really enjoy and getting caught up in the flattery of people wanting you to do things.

By not paying attention to your body, you are putting it in the same predicament as a neglected child. How can a child be expected to develop normally if the parents pay no attention, if they ignore its cries for help, and remain indifferent to whether their child is happy or unhappy?

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

Everywhere I go, I hear 'Welcome back.' But everywhere I have been, I have always been with myself. I'm with myself now more than ever. It's funny people say 'Welcome back' when I haven't gone anywhere.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

When you find yourself talking about less and less and forgetting the love that you bring, never forget there are things you can replace but others you can not.

I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?

It's irrelevant to me if other people know who I am. I'm just, I'm really happy. It calms me down, too. If you're on top of an oilrig, fighting with politicians, or whatever - you need a bit of wisdom to realize that you're not always right, or that you're not always being reasonable, or you're not always listening.

No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

The people is dead! Good-day, Self!

... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.

What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

Most of us are taught from an early age to pay far more attention to signals coming from other people than from within. We are encouraged to ignore our own needs and wants and to concentrate on living up to others expectations.

I try not to take things too personally, because most of the time, people aren't even thinking about anyone else but themselves.

I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain. I can't hear the echo of my footsteps, or can't remember the sound of my own name.

It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.