Top 100 I Told Myself Quotes
#1. Guerilla warfare? I was in way over my head. I told myself that I could do this. It was guerilla warfare every time I went to sleep.
Laura Thalassa
#2. If somebody told me you'd be a one and a half billion dollar company and be the largest in the world, I wouldn't have believed it myself.
Baba Kalyani
#3. Eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result it has gotten easier for me to take what comes.
Jodi Picoult
#4. The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy systemI had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you chane a lightbulb, call someone from the other room and have him watch until you are finished.
David Sedaris
#5. I'd always told myself that I deserve good things, that I was worthy, but if I ever believed it. You can't tell yourself anything. Your heart only believes what it feels, and experience is the best teacher.
Penelope Douglas
#6. A wonderful pastor I know once told me, "Perfectionism is the highest order of self-abuse." So now I try to remind myself that if I engage in perfectionism, I am abusing myself. Period.
Ashley Judd
#7. Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.
Don DeLillo
#8. The director calmed me down and told me I was being too hard on myself. He went on to say that I wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but needed to tone things down a bit.
Dwight Schultz
#9. "I believe I'll keep that one to myself, luv. If I told you all my secrets, there would be no more mystery in our relationship."
"I'm not a big fan of mysteries."
That roguish smile I once hated curls his lips and curls my insides. "Rubbish. You adore them."
A.G. Howard
#10. Usually I like playing other people. I like finding myself through other characters. But when you do cabaret, you are yourself. I think it's the most fun, and I tell you, if somebody had told me that, I would have done it fifteen years earlier than I did.
Faith Prince
#11. My whole life growing up, both my parents told me not to swear like a sailor. After college, I recall there was finally a time where I swore, and neither one of them was correcting me, and I felt so relieved. I thought, finally; I can finally be myself and not get yelled at.
Rory Freedman
#13. It was total naivety that got me to Hollywood. I thought it was going to happen straight away. I told myself 'give it 5 years, there's no way I'll be here after that if it doesn't happen'. Cut to ten years later!
Naomi Watts
#14. Being alone in a room full of people who never really looked at you didn't bother me. Or at least that's what I told myself.
Ilsa Madden-Mills
#15. I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
Anne Lamott
#16. I told myself after 2008 that I was done for good. But they say you can't keep a gymnast away from her sport.
Shawn Johnson
#18. In my day, girls jumped when a Wise One said jump, and continued jumping until they were told to stop. As I am still alive, it is still my day. Need I make myself clearer? - Sorilea
Robert Jordan
#19. Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children; or for anyone.
I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.
Kate Chopin
#20. I introduced myself to then-Lieutenant General Petraeus and told him about my research interests; he gave me his card and offered to put me in touch with other researchers and service members working on the same issues.
Paula Broadwell
#21. And then one day, one of my daughters sat me down and told me that even though he was gone, I wasn't. That it was time to find a new life for myself.
Brenda Rothert
#22. I yearned to get better; I told myself I was getting better. In fact, the depression was still there, like a powerful undertow. Sometimes it grabbed me, yanked me under; other times, I swam free.
Tracy Thompson
#23. I told myself that once I was done ripping the seagull's head off, I would turn around and give a speech so saccharine that even Eddie wouldn't be able to console them when I was finished. I would destroy them, and they would drown in an ocean of their tears.
But first the seagull.
T.J. Klune
#24. I do not concern myself with being unique, and I do not concern myself with success. I feel I just do and say what I am supposed to. I do not know where it comes from. I go where I am told, and I just allow whatever it is to come out.
Wayne Dyer
#25. This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.
John Banville
#26. As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the 'illegal' that my own country has not bothered to get to know.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#27. A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so.
Samuel Beckett
#28. Dead bodies, I told myself, were nothing more than broken shells on a beach. It was just that in the morgue, that beach so often looked like a bad stretch of the Jersey shore.
Sibella Giorello
#29. ...so I looked at this kid from West Texas, feelin' all cut up an' betrayed 'cause he suddenly realized the Land of the Free been fuckin' him in the ass all his life--an' I told myself, 'Shit, so that's what it's like to be the white boy. Any nigga you ask can tell you that's how America works.
Garth Ennis
#30. I love you," she whispered. "I told myself I wouldn't make it hard, that I'd never breathe those words. But 'tis harder for me to go without saying them. I need to give them to you.
Maya Banks
#31. I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.
Margaret Drabble
#32. I had my eyes closed in the dark, I sighed a million sighs, I told a million lies, to myself, to myself.
Van Morrison
#33. Huging my pillow to my chest, I told myself, At least soon you won't have so much time to miss him. Soon school will start again, and then you'll be busier.
Wait. Am I reduced to HOPING for school to start?
Somehow, I have discovered a whole new level of pathetic.
Claudia Gray
#34. I told my mom I would graduate. I owe that much to her and myself.
Carmelo Anthony
#35. I've spent too many years at war with myself, the doctor has told me it's not good for my health.
Sting
#36. I told myself there was no way I was going to let this training go to waste. It was my time, and I was ready to go.
Katie Hoff
#37. Somebody told me when Abe Lincoln was a young man, studying by firelight, he said, "I will work hard. I will prepare myself. And my time will come." And you know, that's exactly what I said about myself and football - What do you think? Were Abe and I both just lucky ducks?
Deacon Jones
#38. I went out with a guy who once told me I didn't need to drink to make myself more fun to be around. I told him, I'm drinking so that you're more fun to be around.
Chelsea Handler
#39. I dreamed of myself in a dream, and told the dream, which was mine, as if it were another person's of whom I dreamed. Indeed what is life when thinking of the past, but dreaming of a dream dreamt by another who seems to be oneself?
Stopford Brooke
#40. IN MY NERVOUSNESS FOR THIS SPEECH AND MY MOMENTS OF DOUBT, I'VE TOLD MYSELF FIRMLY, 'IF NOT ME, WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN?'
Emma Watson
#41. Pull yourself together," I told myself sternly. "You have to stay positive. You'll never make it if you give up.
Norah McClintock
#42. It was like diving into winter waves. "I can't," I told him.
"Why not?"
"Because I need to find out who I am by myself before I can be with anyone else.
Louise Hawes
#43. I told myself that was why, that I wasn't bringing you back because it hurt too much to lose you. That a lifetime without free will wasn't worth three more
days with you. That wasn't good enough. I had to do it for the right reasons, you know. For them, not for us.
Kelly Meding
#44. I told a perspective employer don't spend 50 Bucks looking up my back ground info on the net. Give me the 50 Bucks and I'll tell you myself.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#45. Finally Victoria sighs and says, Julia, I'd be happy if you told me just enough of the facts so I could imagine it. So I could recreate it for myself. So I could imagine that I was really there.
Eleanor Catton
#46. From an early age my mother told me that there were so many of us that if I was to get anything in life I would have to get it myself. So I did.
Michael Lee-Chin
#47. I told him I'm not going to marry you and hang on to you like a barnacle, just to keep you to myself and stop you loving anyone else.
Kristin Cashore
#48. SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE. EVERYTHING DIES IN THE END. I CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY? "I too cannot be cheated," snapped Fate.
Terry Pratchett
#49. Somewhere along the journey i lost myself; i learnt to be who they told me to be, i lived that girl for decades until their truth showed me; the words they were preaching didnt match the the steps they were walking, so i was done with their opinion and went on my unique way.
Nikki Rowe
#50. Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
Haruki Murakami
#51. Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.
Amy Tan
#52. I should have told her at the time. I could have taken a deep breath, looked away, and forced myself to say it.
Banana Yoshimoto
#53. As a child I trained myself to dance in very high heels. At 13, in Destiny's Child, we were told to wear heels, but at first we couldn't walk in them. We couldn't keep our knees straight, but we learned.
Beyonce Knowles
#54. I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma - '
'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.
J.P. Delaney
#55. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.
Barbara Pym
#56. But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]
Hilary Mantel
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.
Emma Cline
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I can hurt myself more than anyone else can," she told her sister. "I can do it with my eyes closed.
Alice Hoffman
#64. 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
#65. My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.
Iyanla Vanzant
#66. Still, as messed-up as it was, I really liked the feel of her bare arms and the smell of her hair. I got mad at myself right away and told myself I wasn't one of those guys, told myself it was just the hit to the head that was making me think that way.
Amanda Lance
#67. I thought, I have been so tired, these last two months. I have got used to that too. I have told myself it is just part of - having had what happened, happen. You do not get over something like that quickly. I had told myself that was all it was. I had almost believed it. I had believed it.
Robin McKinley
#68. I hate a liar. Maybe because I'm such a good one myself, heh? Anyway, to find someone has told an out and out lie puts him on the other side of the fence from me for all time.
Clark Gable
#69. I went back to my thoughts of Lia. How could I tell her that I knew in my gut from almost the beginning that we were meant to be together? That I had seen myself growing old with her. That a gift I wasn't even sure she really possessed had told me her name long before I ever laid eyes on her.
Mary E. Pearson
#70. Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.
Anne Rice
#71. 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
#72. I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.
Jeff VanderMeer
#73. During my time in prison, I told myself that I wanted to be a part of the solution and not the problem.
Michael Vick
#74. 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
#75. I was always told that music isn't a 'realistic' path to take, and like a normal human being, I doubted myself over and over because I was afraid of failure.
Alessia Cara
#76. You shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings of
Hecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That was
indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.
Seneca.
#77. 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
#78. I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.
Barbara Pym
#79. I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!
Thomas A. Edison
#80. 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
#81. Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting "get off the fucking road you fucking wanker" actually meant.
Matt Haig
#82. I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.
Charlotte Turner Smith
#83. 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
#84. I stood up for myself as I always have done. Nobody has ever told Coco Chanel what to think.
Coco Chanel
#85. 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
#86. I told the record company I didn't feel the need to be at red-carpet events. I wanted a career. But I wanted to keep myself intact as a person.
Enya
#87. 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
#88. I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do.
Joe Satriani
#89. I told you before, I don't want out of this marriage. And if you give me nothing but daughters for the next twenty years, I would consider myself blessed.
Natasha Anders
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Playing in the National Football League, you're told, you know, where to be, when to be there, what to wear, how to be there. Being able to step away from that, I have an opportunity to look deeper into myself and look for what's real.
Ricky Williams
#93. When I told the fans I was an alcoholic, they all applauded. When I told them I had given myself to a higher power, they cheered again.
Grace Lee Whitney
#94. All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
Sylvia Plath
#95. I wasn't ever going to play Carnegie Hall, or arenas with the E Street Band, but I did still play - plenty - and had work I liked and was good at. If a man or woman wants more, I often told myself, that man or woman is tempting the gods.
Stephen King
#96. In 'The Next Three Days,' even though it was a prison breakout movie, I was asking myself, 'What would I do? How far would I go for the woman I loved? How far would I go, and what would I do when the person then told me that they were guilty? Could I still believe in them?' So it was very personal.
Paul Haggis
#97. America is a melting pot for all different groups of people, historically. And it's rare that the story of all of these people will be told in the history books. So I always felt I had to find out my history for myself and research my roots.
Nas
#98. I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I was born to a single mom. She was a wonderful woman, and she taught me to believe in myself, to work hard, play by the rules. She wanted me to get a good education, and she just told me that the best thing I could do is just study hard.
Raul Labrador
#99. 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
#100. I watched him go and told myself that the only reason I was smiling like that was because the cameras were hidden somewhere, not because of anything Kile Woodwork had done.
Kiera Cass
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