self-image

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

The greater self-confidence an individual possesses, the less inclined he is to put down others. This says a lot about those who constantly belittle.

A princess once carefully kissed a porcupine to be kind, upon which he began to think himself a prince. He then dressed like a prince, behaved like a prince, and announced himself to be a prince. The world, therefore, saw him as such, and so a porcupine prince he was. (Of course, most were reluctant to argue with him otherwise.)

To look in the mirror and smile is a challenge for many people. Those who do so without the slightest scowl are indeed fortunate.

What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live -- with your self-respect alive and growing.

There is a difference between being able to love and believing your love is valuable, worth giving away.

Beauty's only skin deep.Everybody has ugly days.We're all made of the same stuff underneath.Acting right is better than looking right.Realize what make you special beyond looks.Evil can look pretty on the outside.

I cannot imagine a sentence more severe than a person limited not by his or her own abilities but by the opinions and expectations of others. And having been made to organize in such a way, comes the remuneration, but no penance or escape.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?

What I wasn__ expecting was the euphoria once my body began releasing endorphins. The mixture of pain and pleasure was ecstasy. Getting my tattoo introduced me to secret, dark pleasures. I would always be a marked prisoner, but I was a liberated soul.

Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I__ touching, so I__ better start paying attention to what I__ touching.

We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.

If we don__ know who we are, we conceal our true selves and wear the image of others

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Their Bibles had become an idol before God. That the cross, as a symbol, was an idol, even their own self-image was an idol before God.

Don't let out your true behaviour in the public, even if you were born nasty, make others feel you were well bred.

It is through our imperfections that our true beauty shines through.

Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.