I Am Content With Who I Am Quotes

If we, who are finite, contingent, created beings, have got God completely figured out, it makes it seem likely that we invented him ... If I am ever completely satisfied with my understanding of who God is and how he operates in the world, I am in danger of ceasing to seek Him. ~ Holly Ordway

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead ~ Harold Brodkey

I am who I am and I am what I am. And it's beautiful. And it's okay even if it doesn't look like the sexiest Victoria Secret model. It also boils down to my interactions with people. ~ Evangeline Lilly

I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you. ~ Frances "Baby" Houseman, Dirty Dancing

I want to be loved, honestly and truly loved, for who I am. And I want to love a woman with all my heart for all my life. I want to ache for her mind, for her body, for her companionship. ~ Kerrelyn Sparks

All these small ideas that
I am a man or a woman,
Sick or healthy, strong or weak
Or that I hate or love or have little power,
are but hallucinations.

Stand up then!
Know that every thought and word
That weakens you in this world is the only evil that exists.
Stand as a rock; you are the Infinite Spirit.
Say, "I am Existence Absolute,
Bliss Absolute,"
and like a lion breaking its cage,
break your chains and be free forever.

What frightens you, what holds you down:
Only ignorance of your true nature,
of your blessedness; nothing else can bind you.
You are the Pure one, the Ever-Blessed.

Therefore, if you dare, stand on that--
mold your whole life on that.
You are the one with the Eternal Soul.
Know then that thou art He,
and model your whole life accordingly;
for those who know this
and model their lives accordingly,
will no more suffer in darkness. ~ Swami Vivekananda

People often romanticize children or adults with special needs, as if they are innocent-yet-wise creatures who can humble us all into becoming better humans. First of all, nobody can be innocent and wise at the same time. That's another one of those impossible combinations. It's as unachievable and improbable as Brenda. Or Carli. And secondly, I'm not suggesting the ladies of Camp Anchor were either one of those things in particular. But they owned their own flaws, and I am grateful I got to meet them when I was only fourteen. I left camp knowing a bunch of women who weren't afraid to claim the guy they wanted to dance with; they didn't change a thing for the men they loved. ~ Amy Schumer

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis. ~ Roger Ebert

It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I. ~ Kamala Suraiyya Das

I'll let them talk
I'll let them hate
I owe no one an explanation nor an apology
As long as they don't see the world through my eyes or walk a single mile in my shoes,
I'll always be the only one who knows the truth,
The only one who really understands.
So all of their judgments and opinions will forever be irrelevant
, never mattered and never had anything to do with who really I am … ~ Samiha Totanji

Thus, if there is anyone who is confident that he can advise me as to the best advantage of the state in this campaign which I am about to conduct, let him not refuse his services to the state, but come with me into Macedonia. I will furnish him with his sea-passage, with a horse, a tent, and even travel-funds. If anyone is reluctant to do this and prefers the leisure of the city to the hardships of campaigning, let him not steer the ship from on shore. ~ Livy

Naked Girl and Mirror

This is not I. I had no body once-
only what served my need to laugh and run
and stare at stars and tentatively dance
on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.
Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone
on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown.
Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?

I stare at you in fear, dark brimming eyes.
Why do you watch me with that immoderate plea-
'Look under these curled lashes, recognize
that you were always here; know me-be me.'
Smooth once-hermaphrodite shoulders, too tenderly
your long slope runs, above those sudden shy
curves furred with light that spring below your space.

No, I have been betrayed. If I had known
that this girl waited between a year and a year,
I'd not have chosen her bough to dance upon.
Betrayed, by that little darkness here, and here
this swelling softness and that frightened stare
from eyes I will not answer; shut out here
from my own self, by its new body's grace-

for I am betrayed by someone lovely. Yes,
I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl.
Your lips in the mirror tremble as I refuse
to know or claim you. Let me go-let me be gone.
You are half of some other who may never come.
Why should I tend you? You are not my own;
you seek that other-he will be your home.

Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted ~ Judith A. Wright

Shonda, how do you do it all?
The answer is this: I don't.
Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life....
That is the trade-off.
That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100 percent okay, you never get your sea legs, you are always a little nauseous. ~ Shonda Rhimes

I am a teacher. It's how I define myself. A good teacher isn't someone who gives the answers out to their kids but is understanding of needs and challenges and gives tools to help other people succeed. That's the way I see myself, so whatever it is that I will do eventually after politics, it'll have to do a lot with teaching. ~ Justin Trudeau

A four-year-old says, "My mommy lives in heaven. Her eyelashes go down instead of up because she is ... in heaven, but I miss her." She feels consoled that her mother "is with God," who, she says, "has pink whiskers, red hair, and two feet. ... I did not want her to die until I died. I think I am going to die too in a little while. ~ Jonathan Kozol

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with. ~ Neil Gaiman

Off with you" is a phrase used by people who lack the courtesy to say something more polite, such as "If there's nothing else you require, I must be going," or "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave, please," or even "Excuse me, but I believe you have mistaken my home for your own, and my valuable belongings for yours, and I must ask you to return the items in question to me, and leave my home, after untying me from this chair, as I am unable to do it myself, if it's not too much trouble. ~ Lemony Snicket

Don't misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders. ~ Michele Bachmann

As a friend of mine put it, "Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing." When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are. ~ Tara Brach

I am in love with stories. How they shape our lives. How they mark people who don't even know us. How they can impact us even when an event didn't exactly occur in our own lives ~ Katy Evans

I do have regrets about the whole thing. I regret most the way I spoke to you. You can talk to whomever you chose to talk to. But this is who I am, it is my nature. Anyone who treats you with anything but the utmost respect is going to get knocked on their ass. I do feel that you belong to me, not that I own you, but that you are mine to protect. ~ Melissa Hale

The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that the presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with. ~ Werner Herzog

I am interested in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game. ~ Margaret Mead

I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in. ~ Linus Torvalds

No one can make me work harder than I do, so I'm generally not interested in who I am competing with. ~ Victoria Principal

I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it. ~ Edith Sitwell

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here. ~ Roger Zelazny

When I don't have a girlfriend, who I am answerable to, I can go out and hang with people. But whether you go for a movie with someone or a meal or a drive, it is assumed that you are dating that person. ~ Shahid Kapoor

I join with Governor Rick Snyder and thousands of grassroots supporters and activists from across the state of Michigan in asking you all to please help me in supporting Pete Hoekstra, who I am proud to endorse. He will be our next United States senator. ~ Candice S. Miller

Openness to my own dreams puts me in touch with the oldest, most human aspects of who I am; it helps me find my place in the community of man. ~ Sheldon B. Kopp

my parents are Mexican who are not
to be confused with Mexican Americans
or Chicanos.

i am a Chicano from Chicago
which means i am a Mexican American
with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos.

my parents are Mexican who are not
to be confused with Mexicans still living
in México. those Mexicans call themselves mexicanos.
white folks at parties call them pobrecitos.
American colleges call them international students & diverse.

my mom was white in México & my dad was mestizo
& after they crossed the border they became diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic.

but my parents call themselves mexicanos,
who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos
living in México. those mexicanos might call
my family gringos, which is the word my family calls
white folks & white folks call my parents interracial.
colleges say put them on a brochure.

my parents say que significa esa palabra.
i point out that all the men in my family
marry lighter-skinned women. that's the Chicano
in me. which means it's the fancy college degrees
in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me
is diverse even when i eat American foods
like hamburgers, which, to clarify, are American
when a white person eats them & diverse
when my family eats them. so much of America
can be understood like this. ~ José Olivarez

The Ball Poem"

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball.
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over - there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight.
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy. ~ John Berryman

The most difficult thing to do after a life well lived is to sit down and type it all out. To start with, your fingers are old and gnarled. You can see the skin crinkled up like paper, the knobby knuckles, the veins standing up blue and aggressive and you wonder, when did your hands change, when did they stop being young and firm and definite, when did the hesitancy creep in, when did the trembling begin. Your mind sieves through memories as thick as molasses and as bitterly sweet. The words trip on your tongue but hesitate to make their way onto the page because you debate endlessly in your head about which of them you should put down in print, terrified of the permanency of the written word. Memories are the kind of elusiveness that shift, change form, and remodel themselves by the second. It is a challenge to wrestle with them, to get them to agree to be analysed, to be put down in words and encapsulated into sentences, moulded into paragraphs. As long as they are shifting, morphing into different things as the moment suits them, they aren't bound by one person's recollection of how things were, of how they happened. These are my memories.
And this was my life. And so I try to write this. I am already half way through what I am trying to put down. I have no idea who would want to read the story of my life. But I write it out, more for myself, than for anyone else who would care to read. ~ Kiran Manral

If I've learned one thing on my journey so far, it's to take all of who I am and embrace it… All of it, and CELEBRATE it. It is so awesome when you can come to a place of personal discovery and discover the deepest parts of you and what makes you come alive. I have also learned that failure is a part of life. I have failed more than I have ever succeeded, but I think that is how life works. The more you fail, the more you will succeed. You will eventually get to your destination, or how I like to call it – that awareness of what you came here to be; to share your gifts with the world. Trust me, this world needs you…The authentic YOU. What a beautiful transformation that can be. ~ Suzanne Nielsen

They say that life is an accident, driven by sexual desire, that the universe has no moral order, no truth, no God.

Driven by insatiable lusts, drunk on the arrogance of power, hypocritical, deluded, their actions foul with self-seeking, tormented by a vast anxiety that continues until their death, convinced that the gratification of desire is life's sole aim, bound by a hundred shackles of hope, enslaved by their greed, they squander their time dishonestly piling up mountains of wealth.

"Today I got this desire, and tomorrow I will get that one; all these riches are mine, and soon I will have even more. Already I have killed these enemies, and soon I will kill the rest. I am the lord, the enjoyer, successful, happy, and strong, noble, and rich, and famous. Who on earth is my equal? ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

those who are weak enough to think this a degrading task, and the time and labour which have been devoted to it misemployed, I shall content myself with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CAeSAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made an apothegm or an oracle.' Having said thus much by way of introduction, I commit the following pages to the candour of the Publick. ~ Anonymous

And yet, despite the multiplicity of times we've done it, it is still a funny, exultant, true thing - where for a short time you turn into something else and fly; where you stop fretting and wanting, and are simply alight with joy - and all while never venturing beyond the walls of your room. And I would put our continued success down to one simple thing. At the end of every tumbling session, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Thank you very much. That was very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. My dear, I am much obliged to you."
Because at the end of the day, that is the hottest sex tip of all: gratitude. That you've found someone who wants to do that thing, with you, and no government has yet found a way to charge you VAT on it. You can set fire to the sky, and not be charged a penny.
Sometimes, it's great being a human. ~ Caitlin Moran

I just realized that I'm just going to be who I am. I don't need to adjust how I look for anyone or even for myself. Even if I have a pimple, I'm not going to cover it up with makeup. ~ Charlyne Yi