Quotes About Defining Myself

#1. Reinforced to me again and again was how I was a 'brave girl' for not crying, a 'good girl' for not complaining, and soon I began defining myself this way, equating strength with silence.

Lucy Grealy

#2. There were so many things I wasn't that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

Mary Miller

#3. I hate when a man feels I'm obligated to disclose my marital status to somebody I don't even know. Even this bullshit about status itself as if married and spinster are the only two choices for defining myself. Or because I'm a woman I'm supposed to have a status at all.

Marlon James

#4. Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

Carol Moseley Braun

#5. No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

Haruki Murakami

#6. My number-one goal is to never feel like I'm strictly defining myself. The minute I feel like I'm doing that as anything - as theatrical, as feminist, as songwriter - I feel like the minute I name it, I'm stuck in a box.

Amanda Palmer

#7. I'm in my 30's, and I'm still struggling with defining myself. I'm working every day to take control of things that are out of my control, and not letting them bring me down or frustrate me, to the point of paralysis.

Lauren Iungerich

#8. I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be. By a gradual process ... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.

Twyla Tharp

#9. I don't like defining myself. I just am.

Britney Spears

#10. I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

G. Willow Wilson

#11. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

Roger Ballen

#12. No doubt, I had some kind of carefully designed pattern for living before my son came. Some strategy for defining myself. Whatever that pattern was, it is long gone. Levered out of the way by a tool so powerful no force on earth can resist it.

Mark Greene

#13. My ability to help my clients was limited by our narrow focus. This was partly my fault for defining myself as a specialist, but I eventually came to see that this problem of reductionism is endemic to our culture.

Peter Morville

#14. The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

Richard Rohr

#15. Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

Claire Cook

#16. It's only when we are able to exceed our rigid interpretations, and we start defining love in it's totality, that we realize that love is everywhere

Julian Pencilliah

#17. If I may take the risk of defining what a spiritual experience is, it is one in which pure awareness reveals itself to you as the maker of reality - where you suddenly discover through insight or meditation or a freak accident that your essential nature is spiritual, non-material.

Deepak Chopra

#18. When you start defining yourself, you put yourself in boxes and I don't want to be trapped in anything because I will always evolve - I will always change. It's like water. I take on many shapes. Everyone should be that way and not define themselves. I am everything.

Karrine Steffans

#19. We are condemned to be free people, liberated people who must make life-defining decisions. Freedom requires choices and all choices entail value decisions.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#20. You have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community. If you don't succeed in this, then you will continue to pull that heavy wagon up the mountain, and despite the fact that you are pulling it, it will somehow run over your own foot.

Srikumar Rao

#21. That's how you're defining right and wrong? By what makes me happy?"
Pride lit his face as he nodded.
Oh Jesus. "Walker, you can't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because I shouldn't be the center of your life!"
His voice was gentle, a little confused. "But you are.

Rowan McBride

#22. When it comes to defining beauty, we need to embrace uniqueness. Remember: it's the imperfections that make the charm.

Rebecca Moses

#23. Every day when a man or woman gets dressed, they are in effect defining who they are. That daily clean slate is a time in our lives when we can determine who we want to be.

Kenneth Cole

#24. Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing.

Per Petterson

#25. I'm still the same artist; it's just different sides of me. I'm learning to be a little bit more confident in myself and I think that's something that all of us girls struggle with. It's really about defining your confidence.

Jamie Lynn Spears

#26. Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

Jacques Ellul

#27. From childhood forward, our hair is one of the most critical, defining aspects of our embodied selves as black women: how we get it done ... how we have to focus on it ... the questions we have to answer about it ... and so forth.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#28. Character is what we do when no one else is watching"

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#29. It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Alison Bechdel

#30. You've no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it's taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it's the defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on.

Peter F. Hamilton

#31. Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

Peter Agre

#32. The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.

Christy Hall

#33. But the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.

Alexandra Fuller

#34. The true defining situation for a person is what they do when they are alone and don't have to do anything else. What do they do? Do they do frivolous things? That's when you define what you are.

Jeff Benedict

#35. The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.

Peter Lindbergh

#36. I would probably list myself as mostly straight. I've met guys all the time that I'm like, Damn, that's a good-looking guy, you know? I've never been, like, Oh, I want to kiss that guy. I really love women. But I think defining yourself as 100% anything is kind of near-sighted and close-minded.

Josh Hutcherson

#37. Magical moments,defining incidents,people who have made a difference to us....some of these change the course of life.I enjoy reliving these off and on to remind myself to look out for empowering moments,magical happenings and people who influence meaningfully.Try it,it is heartening and powerful

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#38. Jerry Robinson illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture's greatest icons. As an artist myself, it's impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work. Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich legacy that he leaves behind.

Jim Lee

#39. The hardest thing was launching 'OK!' magazine; the easiest thing was Channel 5. 'The Express' was my defining moment because our turnover was less than £100m with 150 employees.

Richard Desmond

#40. Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.

Sonia Sotomayor

#41. Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.

Louis Untermeyer

#42. Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

Malcolm Bradbury

#43. Somewhere between what the lens depicts and what the caption interprets, a mental picture intervenes, a cultural ideology defining what and how to see, what to recognize as significant.

Alan Trachtenberg

#44. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#45. We have laid the foundation for a better life. Things that were unimaginable a few years ago have become everyday reality. I belong to the generation of leaders for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge.

Nelson Mandela

#46. There is an inherent dissonancebetween the quasi-formal world of computer programs - defining the programmed machine in each system - and the non-formal problem world of the system requirements.

Michael Jackson

#47. What defines me? Skin? I hope I'm more than that. Than this. That I am what I think, what I believe. What I feel.

Lissa Price

#48. The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

John Rawls

#49. Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.

Kathleen Hanna

#50. Becoming a mother was the single defining event of my life. It felt like the whole world shifted.

Debra Messing

#51. He is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky.

Warren Ellis

#52. When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.' page 21

Jane McGonigal

#53. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [ ... ] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

Thomas Friedman

#54. We all have life-defining moments. They are like open-book tests, but we don't know we have been examined until it is over.

John Bevere

#55. The experience of loss does not have to be the defining moment in our lives. Instead the defining moment can be our response to the loss. It is not what happens to us that matters so much as what happens in us.

Jerry Sittser

#56. If Microsoft is the new IBM, Google is the new Microsoft - the defining company of the industry.

Mitchell Kapor

#57. The radical defining himself as a producer of actions and discourses has ended up fabricating a purely quantitative idea of revolution - as a kind of crisis of overproduction of acts of individual revolt

Anonymous

#58. Again he thought of his own losses, and he wondered why it was that the things a person had lost - or might lose - defined him more than the things he yet possessed.

David Anthony Durham

#59. Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.

Thom Hartmann

#60. We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.

Eugene Kennedy

#61. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.

Joyce Carol Oates

#62. He is the cornerstone of a defining life moment for me.

Kitty Thomas

#63. The defining qualities that will distinguish great leaders from the rest are stemmed from the mindset level.

Pearl Zhu

#64. Everyone has their own insecurities, regardless of how you look or how people perceive you, but sometimes people give their insecurities too much power. Defining beauty is simply a matter of opinion. For me, real beauty has very little to do with the structure of someone's face or body.

Devon Aoki