Diane Ackerman Quotes

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

As I walk'd by myself, I talk'd to myself, And myself replied to me; And the questions myself then put to myself, With their answers I give to thee.

In my head I'm talking all the time.

The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

I do talk to myself, just not in a whisper. But I have caught myself sometimes.

I talk to myself a lot.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

There's no harm in talking to yourself, but try to avoid telling yourself jokes you've heard before.

A lot of my music is just self-observation. Like telling you, "Oh man. What did I just do? How much did I just pay for this chain? Why did I do that? Wait a minute." Let me talk about that. Or like, the temptation. Let me talk about that. Let me observe myself.

I like to hold a monologue with women. But a dialogue with myself is more stimulating.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

Self-criticism expands the opportunities for discourse and eliminates the need for an adversary.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.

The moment it begins to question itself, the mind becomes so clear that it starts working with itself rather than with the body's identification.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.