I Told Myself Quotes

#1. Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

Stefan Zweig

#2. I told myself it didn't matter if I never got to be with you. It was enough just to love you.

Claudia Gray

#3. But things can change, that's what I told myself. Mistakes can be undone, wrongs righted. That's what brought me home. Hope.

John Hart

#4. A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn't start crying.

David Mitchell

#5. I realized then that there was actual relief in his expression. That he was pleased to see me in a way he wasn't actually going to be able to say. And I told myself that it was going to have to be enough. I wod do the thing he had asked for. That would have to be enough.

Jojo Moyes

#6. I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now.

Jo Walton

#7. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn't care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get back my stolen memories and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to claim my whole self.

Haruki Murakami

#8. Death was just an image, I told myself, a coming together of events in a single frame, and pain was just a part of the painting and haven't we learned our lesson? Meaning is most poignant when never fully accessed.

Alison Espach

#9. I told Victria that love is a choice, and I told myself that I didn't have to choose Elder, but I can't forget the way my heart stopped when his did.

Beth Revis

#10. I told myself that the last thing I needed was something else to love- something else to lose.

Ellery A. Kane

#11. I'm not really a child of this '120 TV channels, a billion websites' era. I tried to live that for a long time but recently realized I don't get anything from it. I told myself it was luxury, but it was really only annoying. I'd rather just watch the same 50 movies over and over.

Bill Callahan

#12. I haven't taken any new projects in the past years - I told myself, if I cannot live long enough to finish it, I don't want it.

I.M. Pei

#13. took something serious away from it. I told myself I would never get so deep into my cups that I wouldn't be able to play.

Duff McKagan

#14. Do not antagonize the cops, I told myself. Repeat if necessary: Do not antagonize the cops.

Gillian Flynn

#15. She was looking right at me, shaking her head, and I told myself she was wrong, so wrong, even as she spoke. You're a goner.

Sarah Dessen

#16. I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

Garth Greenwell

#17. I told myself that some families we get without asking, while others we choose.
And I chose those two. I think that's what you'd call a silver lining.

Jenny Valentine

#18. I told myself no matter what she did i would not let the b**** take me down

Dave Pelzer

#19. I told myself that, too. It turned out myself was a skeptical bitch and didn't believe me.

C.E. Murphy

#20. There were times when chemo would eat my body, but I told myself that I have the strength and courage to win and come out stronger.

Yuvraj Singh

#21. Till now, I told myself, You have only seen the shadow and been well content with it; now, I am going to lead you into the substance.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#22. But the fact that I couldn't hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I'd been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two, now I was closing in on it.
Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward.

Susanna Kaysen

#23. I have a memory of my mother kneeling in front of a cabinet in our home, tenderly cradling her wedding china. We never used the plates; she died in her 40s without ever letting herself enjoy these gorgeous pieces. I told myself that I would use my precious items.

Roma Downey

#24. One day," I told myself, "one brave and magnificent day, I will actually be cool." I

Jim Butcher

#25. It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feinr forever, but there's no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.

Lemony Snicket

#26. I told myself I'd stay in until I reached major, and then go on and do something else.

Russel Honore

#27. I told myself when I was broke and homeless that my biggest goal was just to have a house. That goal was achieved. I'm just really, really lucky.

Rosa Salazar

#28. I told myself that my separation from Dash was necessary. I couldn't wreck my hike for anyone, not Dash, no one. I knew this now.

Aspen Matis

#29. I told myself, 'When I grow up, I want to make pictures that can inspire and nourish people.' Immediately, when I was 10, I started photographing nature. I built a darkroom. My first really good darkroom, not just down in the cellar, was when I was 14.

Bill Atkinson

#30. God isn't fooled by mercenary goodness I told myself and went back to manic smiling.

Janice Galloway

#31. I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed, because God loved me. Then I told myself that God loved us all and that many would die or be ruined physically or mentally or both by the next morning and in the days following.

Eugene B. Sledge

#32. The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.

Diane Ackerman

#33. During my time in prison, I told myself that I wanted to be a part of the solution and not the problem.

Michael Vick

#34. I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

Sarah Dessen

#35. What was the step down from vampire chauffeur? Werewolf walker?
Pedicurist for Bigfoot? I would have to Google that in the morning, I told myself.

Molly Harper

#36. My other treasure was my virginity, and I'd thought of selling it too, years back, to the steward's hunchback son. I had refrained, holding out -I told myself- for a higher bidder. Now I fancied myself ruler of an impregnable realm.

Sandra Gulland

#37. I'm going to remember this, I told myself sternly. I'm going to remember how awful they made me feel today. So when I'm scared and alone and whatever else is going to happen to me starts to happen, I'm going to remember that nothing about be as bad as being stuck here.Nothing.

P.C. Cast

#38. I told myself, Malala, you have already faced death. This is your second life. Don't be afraid - if you are afraid, you can't move forward.

Malala Yousafzai

#39. I'd only been in the business three or four years, but I told myself that someday I'd like to be Mort Janklow.

Larry Kirshbaum

#40. ...hope nourishes while loss empties a person out," he said.... "Lila, my love, my love,...lay down your weapons. Don't punish us because I told myself a different story than the one you told yourself.

Anat Talshir

#41. Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily ... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.

Erica Jong

#42. The Three Cs, I told myself. When you're not Comfortable with it, it's not a Compliment, it's Creepy.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

#43. The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist.

Vladimir Sorokin

#44. But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.

Elaine Dundy

#45. I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Norman Mailer

#46. Breathe, man, just breathe, I told myself and had to think of old women at the beach in bikinis. When that didn't help, I had to go a little further and picture them in thongs. Voila! No more stiffy.

R.D. Cole

#47. My injury, I told myself to deal with it, and bounce back stronger. I think I have.

Djibril Cisse

#48. You are strong and independent, I told myself as I unlocked the door. Capable and clever. No males needed.

Susan Dennard

#49. Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting "get off the fucking road you fucking wanker" actually meant.

Matt Haig

#50. Don't think, I told myself. Think nothingness. But even nothingness was something. It was a thought.

Markus Zusak

#51. I told myself it was the snow - she couldn't possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It's amazing the sorts of things you'll make yourself believe.

Libba Bray

#52. Married pixy, I told myself, forcing my eyes back to the shelf of ceramic animals. Fifty-four kids. Beautiful wife, sweet as sugar, who would kill me in my sleep while apologizing for it.

Kim Harrison

#53. i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

Ian McEwan

#54. I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

Jodi Picoult

#55. Time would be my friend, I told myself.
Yet time, I knew even then, was my enemy.

Robin Maxwell

#56. I loved you recklessly from the moment I knew you. I never cared about the consequences. I told myself I did, I told myself you wanted me to, and so I tried, but I never did. I wanted you more than I wanted to be good. I wanted you more than I wanted anything, ever.

Cassandra Clare

#57. I lost you three years ago, I told myself I'd never let that happen again. It's important to me to be with you, B. But I can't be if you don't let me.

Kandi Steiner

#58. Since I began booking some stuff with no formal acting training I told myself, that I needed to really study to stay in the game for the longevity and I did just that.

Jaime Zevallos

#59. This is not a crisis, I told myself. You are alive.

Veronica Roth

#60. It is good to see people happy with one another. It is a glimpse of a world in which everyone is that way. A happy world might be boring, I told myself, but watching Jake grin at Cleo grinning at Jake grinning at Cleo and back again, I thought it was worth the risk.

Lemony Snicket

#61. That won't happen, I told myself. I won't let it happen. Like Hillary Clinton said in 2008, I'm in it to win it. Except, of course, she had lost. 5

Stephen King

#62. I told myself that I loved my independence: being able to do whatever I wanted, go wherever I wanted, eat whatever I wanted, but deep down, I longed to share my life with someone.

Penelope Ward

#63. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, after I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe , or start collecting model aeroplanes

Michel Houellebecq

#64. I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

Salman Rushdie

#65. And if sometimes, late at night in bed, I questioned whether or not I truly was insane, I told myself that it didn't matter. I was too happy to care.

Jessica Verday

#66. I told myself that it took forty-two facial muscles to frown and only four to stretch out my arm and bitch-slap the witch.

Kathy Lette

#67. I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

James Lee Burke

#68. One day I woke up with an atrocious hangover, and it hurt so badly that I told myself, 'It's time to stop. I can't do it anymore. It's not good. It hurts too much.'

Jordan Knight

#69. The love we'd shared always burned within me, no matter how often I told myself to move on, no matter how much the world did think I'd moved on.

Richelle Mead

#70. I was homeless for about 8 months, I refused to live with my dad or anyone for that matter. So I stayed somewhere that had no hot water, ever, no heat, I told myself I have to be strong and get through it on my own.

Eric West

#71. Sometimes, I told myself, change was good.

Dorothy Benton Frank

#72. She closed her eyes. "I didn't know that. i didn't know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to be with you.

Ann Brashares

#73. Don't be closer to twice a friend's weight than to her actual weight, I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.

Mindy Kaling

#74. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

Jojo Moyes

#75. I told myself a while back, 'Love what you do, but don't fall in love with what you do.' That way you won't be brokenhearted if ever it gets canceled five episodes in - which has happened to me.

Nathan Fillion

#76. I've never really seen myself as an actress. I told myself, 'I'm not going to get a job where I need to put on makeup, or one that I need to do my nails.' I hate the idea of putting on makeup, then removing it.

Ann Kok

#77. Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

Maya Angelou

#78. And I'm the tool," I muttered. Then I thought about it, sighed, and shook my head. "One day," I told myself, "one brave and magnificent day, I will actually be cool.

Jim Butcher

#79. There was something about the smallest gestures with him that made me feel like a teenager again. I told myself to just enjoy it.

Cindi Madsen

#80. Maybe it was what I needed too. For all those years I told myself

Dorothea Benton Frank

#81. So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop.

Phil Knight

#82. I told myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments.

John Green

#83. Sitting there at one twenty in the afternoon in a maroon Chrysler, I told myself that I had to cherish that magical moment, because there was no guarantee that I would never again know what it felt like to hear that for the first time.

Ahmir Questlove Thompson

#84. I could not recall the last time I had been so flagrantly insulted.

Don't make enemies, I told myself.
Swallow your pride.
Hold your tongue.

But the fact was, I had real difficulty with those particular virtues.

Jen Crane

#85. Our luck would not run out. That's what i told myself. But they were only words

James Patterson

#86. I told myself this was probably a bad idea, to let him kiss me into a confession. But, I reasoned, if there was ever a way to cave, this was it.

Kiera Cass

#87. Every damn breath hurt like hell, but I kept Breathing too. I told myself it would be a privilege to breathe through pain like that for the rest of my life - just knowing each breath was a gift.

Rachel Van Dyken

#88. He was, I told myself, a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key.

Vera Brittain

#89. I was not a doper, I told myself - I just injected myself to recover and needed pills to sleep.

David Millar

#90. Growled. Like a pissed-off wolf. No, like a whiny dog, I told myself firmly. One of those little yappy ones. Wolves kicked ass and Hunter didn't. He was a giant, fake asshole.

Joanna Wylde

#91. Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying in premiums.

Dodie Smith

#92. For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have failed.

Chris Evans

#93. Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

Jennifer Weiner

#94. He deserved someone better than me--but no, I told myself, that wasn't quite right. He'd deserved someone different from me. Someone who could love him fully. Didn't we all deserve that? I wanted to believe so.

Lindsay Smith

#95. I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band.

Paul Fleischman

#96. When Michael pulled away, Eva was beyond shocked to see tears in his eyes.
I told myself I would be strong, that I would let you go if you wished it, but I cannot. Stay with me, Eva. Don't leave me.

Rosalie Lario

#97. This is A Moment, stay with it, I told myself,

Dean Koontz

#98. At that time I told myself that I didn't want to fall in love ever again. But that night while praying for your happiness Nana, I thought that despite all the wounds and all the pains it could cause I wanted to dream again, and love someone with all my heart.

Ai Yazawa

#99. I thought I was grown-up. I thought I knew what I was doing. These were a few of the lies I told myself.

Gabrielle Zevin

#100. I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.

Shirley Jackson