I Myself. Quotes

The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.

[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.

I was a lazy reader as a kid. One nutrition label on a box of Cap’n Crunch and I’d have to take a nap.

The highest aim was never to master Jiu Jitsu

Only gravity can hold me down

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

It's good to dream. We can't out-give God. We can't out-love him, and we can't out-dream him.

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

Ask yourself before making a decision

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

Next time I will ...""From now on I will ..."- What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow?

Only one person can stop me or keep me going

...once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.

My purpose is to serve a purpose to humanity

If the praise of man elates me and his blame depresses me

Words used to be all I had. Now even they have deserted me.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

My health is like a garden

I am a mother. I see clearly that while I've been teaching them, they have been my reason to learn.

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

Tonight shall be the very beginning.''Was it?''It shall be. For me.''My beginning was the albatrosses.''That is a good beginning

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

Stories are psycho-diagnostic ― they diagnose the condition of our psyches. When we watch, read or hear a story, whatever detail jumps out reflects an issue in our psyche that requires our attention.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

You're not winged because you are flying on a dragon

But the amazing thing about life, I've finally discovered, is that you really don't learn from past mistakes. You do logically, reasonably, but emotionally not for a second.

Sky is not a limit for me

Lead me not into temptation

Of course love is blind

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Sprawled out on the front lawn/ looking up at an ordinary sky/ it could fall on me and some how be/ the day I didn't die.

I simply want to live

I can be a better me than anyone can

When I loved myself enough, I let the tomboy in me swing off the rope in Jackass Canyon. Yes!

When I loved myself enough, I no longer needed things or people to make me feel safe.

I don't want everyone to like me

The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Wanted: Steel toed Bible thumpers to reach a monster truck mad world.

When I loved myself enough, I would sometimes wake in the night to music playing within me.

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity

I started creating

I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.

The experience of humanism is that 'nothing human is alien to me'

Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

I wanted desperately to be part of our pack