Alexander Theroux Quotes

Most people have a time-bound awareness. And the reason is they have sacrificed their self for their self-image.

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.

There is always one thing to be grateful for - that one is one's self and not somebody else.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

No matter where you go, you are what you are playa.

We are so defined by how people see us. We're a very materialistic culture. We're a very image-driven culture. What if that goes away and you are left with, God help us, what, indeed, is your essential self?

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Our future will be shaped by the assumptions we make about who we are and what we can be.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You don't lose what you never had.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.

You write who you are. But you also cheat, and youwrite what you want to be. It's embarrasing to be the guy who madethe movie, knowing you're not exactly who you want to be.

Above all, know that ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

If you keep changing for every person who tells you to, then who's going to be left? Why get the success and be somebody else?

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

I have in my life concentrated more on self-expression than self-denial.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty.

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.

Sometimes I try to lose my identity, and I can't get rid of it!

It's important not to lose who you are in a relationship just because it's nice to cuddle with somebody.

It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.