Richard Rohr Quotes

The Hollywood lifestyle was just overwhelming. A party here, an interview there, magazine and modeling shoots daily, your face everywhere and girls throwing themselves at you. As great as it felt at the time, I still felt something missing, and that I needed to change.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.

And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Africa is trying to find its way back to a sense of itself, when much of that was lost through colonization.

My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.

If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.

I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

ʺThe contractʹs null and void, by the way.ʺ

Everything you think you're supposed to feel even, or do. When it doesn't match up with what everything that the culture is telling you to do, you feel like a failure.

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

I'm an Aries. I need everybody to like me.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, it could be that I've lost my way.

I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

I was working through a lot of challenges at every angle of my life, and a lot of self-doubt, a lot of pity-partying. And I think every woman in her twenties has been there - where it feels like no matter what you are doing to fight through the thing that is holding you back, nothing can fill that void.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.