#v

I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#god #imagination #literature #literature-quotes #poetry

Our parents can show us a lot of things: they can show us how we are to be and what things we ought to strive for, or they can show us how not to be and what things we ought to stray from, then you may have the kind of parents that show you all the things about you that you want to get rid of and you realize those traits aren't yours at all but are merely your parents' marks that have rubbed off onto you. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#learning #parents #parents-and-children #self-awareness #self-development

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#freedom

she was aware of his love - how could she not? She perceived it every time he looked at her. He was not demonstrative, but his ardour was all the more evident for the reins with which he restrained it, the mask of steel behind which he imprisoned it, his detached demeanour and deliberate gestures that, far from parading a lack of interest, displayed the strength of his self-discipline, that he could so tightly curb the intensity of his passion. ↗

— Cecilia Dart-Thornton

#lovers #love

Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you... ↗

— Banana Yoshimoto

#self-discovery #self-awareness

...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being. ↗

— Brian Tracy

#frogs #productivity #procrastination

I never, my producer never, we never let myself just sing. We were always trying to get the perfect vocal. ↗

— K. D. Lang

#get #i #just #myself #never

It is the selfish parents who are to blame. Pay attention, be involved in your children’s lives. They are your legacy, your only hope. ↗

— Aaron B. Powell

#child-abuse #child-violence #rage #bullying

Suddenly I grasped what was happening- they were all trying to save me. I never thought I was worth saving. ↗

— Albert Borris

#self-worth #self-worth

Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving ↗

— David Levithan

#every-day #self-worth