Top 100 She Was Herself Quotes
#1. The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.
E. M. Forster
#2. ...she was herself entire, and knew she could not be consumed.
Helen Oyeyemi
#3. Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.
Neil Gaiman
#4. She didn't have to be offered anything; it was already hers. She was more herself than anyone else ever was and as soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew I wanted to be myself just as much as she was herself.
Melvin Burgess
#5. She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.
Sara Sheridan
#6. Girls irritated her, intimidated her, and finally bored her; around girls she became a territorial, sniffing their asses, showing her teeth. It was not a part of herself she liked. Around boys she was herself, she could relax; she had nothing to win but them.
Eleanor Henderson
#8. She just couldn't face caring for a child all alone.'
'People do it all the time.'
'She wasn't "people", she was herself. She knew what she could handle and what she couldn't.
Octavia E. Butler
#9. He was just as unwilling to talk about himself as she was herself. 'So what changed you?' He sipped his lemonade and carefully set his glass down. 'Finally grew up, I suppose.' Manny
Mary Burton
#10. What she liked the most about drinking was not being present, that feeling of self-evasion, of disconnection, of liberation, of escape. Alcohol offered her an excellent alternative to being herself without actually dying.
Laura Esquivel
#11. Did he know that she was so dissatisfied with herself that she was always pretending to be different? Probably he did, and despised her for it. More than anyone she knew, Joe Willard was always, fearlessly, himself.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#12. Bucks, doe - thank God everything boils down to money, I always say."
"During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate."
"So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed.
Lorrie Moore
#13. The change, she knew, was only in herself; she was relieved of deception, and her mind was free to work on its familiar paths. She recognized for the first time that lies worked damage in two directions.
Rosemary Kirstein
#14. His gaze lingered on her mouth and she shuddered. God, he was beautiful. There was something deep in his slate-colored eyes - something stirring, soulful - and Cassandra found herself wanting to know more.
Remy Landon
#15. She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence ... they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good ...
Eva Ibbotson
#16. The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.
Pearl S. Buck
#17. She became an illusion of herself. It was easier to cope with people that way
Tina J. Richardson
#18. Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)
Andre Dubus III
#19. That's what parenthood was about, wasn't it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn't yours anymore but herself.
Megan Abbott
#20. The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door.
Thomm Quackenbush
#21. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.
Paulo Coelho
#22. Even as she was about to read the mysterious, tortured hero's declaration of undying passion to the piquant young heroine, Rosalind found herself obliged instead to look up into Marius's decidedly un-mysterious, non-tortured face.
Emma Clifton
#23. She was haunted by the possibility that she had missed her chance for happiness. But she had not missed her chance, she told herself, for her chance would not let her get away so easily. Each morning she was fortified by hope: the future loomed.
Amanda Coplin
#24. And would she herself have married Darcy had he been a penniless curate or a struggling attorney? ... Elizabeth knew that she was not formed for the sad contrivances of poverty.
P.D. James
#25. Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert's delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
#26. He knew her. He knew her, this man she'd married, this man she'd committed herself to walking through this life with. He knew her. And - wonder of wonders - he was still here.
Dennis Lehane
#27. Baine was controlling her passion, curbing it from a destructive wild-natured thing, to something beautiful and wonderful. For the countless time since his arrival, Ivy found herself not caring about anything else. All she wanted was for the mouth dance to continue. Forever.
Shirley Bourget
#28. She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.
Alice Walker
#29. We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#30. I started singing when I was about 3 and dancing soon after. Mom just started looking for outlets where I could perform and availed herself of any opportunity she could in the mountains of North Carolina in the '70s.
Bellamy Young
#31. I'm the Bonesaw Killer's daughter," she whispered, almost to herself. "Why would you ever think I was good?
Dia Reeves
#32. Sissie knew that she had to stop herself from crying. Why weep for them? In fact, stronger in her was the desire to ask somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks' unhappiness.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#33. Acting was all about making yourself feel things-love,rage,euphoria,agony. She had to unlearn those things now. She had to teach herself not to feel. Refusing to feel hurt also meant she numbed herself to joy, but the sacrifice was worth it.
Susan Wiggs
#34. It had been the most difficult part of coming to terms with what she was; knowing that she had to give up a potentially blissful and wildly happy relationship with Caleb. But it was her responsibility, she told herself, to say goodbye to him.
Katie Lynn Johnson
#35. Julian was a part of that, the beginning of battle and the cold of the middle of it and the fierceness of the fighting. There was nothing she wanted to look at more in the moments before a battle than his face. Nothing that made her feel more fully at home in herself, more like a Shadowhunter.
Cassandra Clare
#36. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would. No:
Jane Austen
#37. How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?
Clarice Lispector
#38. The only thing she could do now was to shed a few tears, feeling rather afraid of herself, an intelligent young woman, who had everything going for her, but who tended to make the wrong decisions. She just hoped that this time she was right.
Paulo Coelho
#39. And since, through lack of vocation or from habit, [Julie] was prone to confuse pity with boredom, she felt herself practically a prisoner ...
Colette
#40. It was with extreme difficulty that Nipper, the black-eyed, who looked on steadfastly, contained herself at this crisis, and, until the subsequent departure of Mrs. Chick. But the nursery being at length free of visitors, she made herself some recompense for her late restraint.
Charles Dickens
#41. And yet never had she felt herself more totally committed to a will which was not her own, more totally a slave, and more content to be so. When
Pauline Reage
#42. Courtney was a doctor herself. She diagnosed herself with Schizophrenia years ago, but didn't take any medication. The point of her barely leaving her home or having limited conversations with people, was to keep her mood swings under control.
Nako
#43. I did not have a father. It was my mom who chose to be alone. She felt that she would be better off by herself with me after I was born.
Olga Kurylenko
#44. She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish's face.
Joe Hill
#45. He knew stripping in front of him was hard on her. Putting herself under his scrutiny and risking rejection was painful. What she didn't seem to understand was that he would never reject her. Ever.
Elle Aycart
#46. Aelin had promised herself, months and months ago, that she would not pretend to be anything but what she was. She had crawled through darkness and blood and despair-she had survived.
Sarah J. Maas
#47. She didn't want to alienate herself from the very wealthy man that was about to offer her a job by declining the polite offer of a drink.
S.A. Tawks
#48. I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.
Haruki Murakami
#49. She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Emile Zola
#50. Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.
Marcel Proust
#51. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Paul Theroux
#52. And before she could help herself, her heart was breaking for him. Like it didn't have anything better to break over.
Rainbow Rowell
#53. There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.
Sue Monk Kidd
#54. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Robert M. Pirsig
#55. Rachel found herself wishing that the week would never end-that her father could stay here forever-but knew he couldn't. If there was one thing she had learned in her brief time at Kalaupapa, it was that all things end.
Alan Brennert
#56. What were her abilities? She played the pianoforte passably well even though it didn't interest her. She loved to read and could spend the rest of her life in a library. She'd written a book, and her imagination was such that she could transport herself from the wilds of Scotland to anywhere.
Karen Ranney
#57. She told herself that life is short. This didn't mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back.
Luke Davies
#58. I don't want to give too much of it away, because I haven't cleared it with Bob, but the treatment is twenty years, and she, in an effort to protect herself faked her death and did a series of things regarding Dr. Loomis, who has died, because Michael Myers was after her.
Kevin Williamson
#59. She had come to him the fool, thinking herself the experienced one. After all, she had nothing to give that another hadn't had, nothing so far as she knew. But he'd taken what hadn't been there; what was his; what was promised.
Shewanda Pugh
#60. Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire
Mira Jacob
#61. At the end of the afternoon she tore herself away from the story to go and buy some tobacco. This would be tricky on a holiday, but never mind, it was mainly a pretext so the story could settle and she'd have the pleasure of meeting up with her new friend again a bit later on.
Anna Gavalda
#62. She scrunched herself around the tickling and giggled. It was a heavenly sound. He moved the bunny back, hopped it forward, tickled her again. The giggling was precious, both in its lack of guile and its spontaneity. He was amazed at how easily it had come.
Barbara Delinsky
#63. She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
Jean Rhys
#64. Ruby Stevens was determined, ambitious and tough. She had to fend for herself in so many ways as a child and always felt apart, on her own.
Victoria Wilson
#65. Elizabeth served herself to Vlad upon the Lazy Susan (Susan wasn't lazy. She was actually dead." - Bats 2015
Fred Barnett
#66. Even if my acquaintance at the publishing party was certain that she herself would never abandon her husband, the question was not entirely up to her. She was not the only person in that bed. All lovers, even the most faithful lovers, are vulnerable to abandonment against their will.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#67. The next morning, boom! She found herself waking in bed next to the handsome, rogue-supporting character of her favourite novel. Out of the blue, Mary Sue was inside the #1 bestseller, epic fantasy novel ever written.
Mads Sukalikar
#68. There is no escape if love is not there, Hannah had said. Had Hannah known when she herself had not even suspected? It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love.
Elizabeth George Speare
#69. There were tears once or twice. But they were not for the men she had lost or the men she had left. They were quiet tears for herself, because there was something inside her that was badly hurt.
Patrick Rothfuss
#70. In the Enron scandal, whistleblower Sherron Watkins is now calling herself Enron Brokovitch. She testified Ken Lay was duped by the other executives. Oh, yeah. When is the last time you got duped and made $100 million?
Jay Leno
#71. The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#72. Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
Gustave Flaubert
#73. All the bullying instincts in her nature rose to the surface. It was not that she was basically unkind. It was because she was so frightened and unsure of herself she was harsh lest others learn her inadequacies: and refuse her authority.
Margaret Mitchell
#74. In that first 'fusion' with Jesus (holy communion), it was my Heavenly Mother again who accompanied me to the altar for it was she herself who placed her Jesus into my soul.
Therese Of Lisieux
#75. [On Virginia Woolf] Craving to be set free from her egomania by something or someone stronger and altogether dissimilar from herself, she speculated endlessly upon the unknown: and for her the unknown was frequently the commonplace.
Michael Holroyd
#76. His voice was low. Calm, assertive. And she actually turned to face the door before she stopped herself. "Stop woman-whispering me.
Jill Shalvis
#77. She was going to have to train herself not to stare at him quite as often as she was used to. That would be no easy task.
Marissa Meyer
#78. Samantha: That Harper is so up herself. Of course it could have happened at a private school. And Abigail's intentions were so noble! It's just that fourteen-year-old girls are stupid. Poor Madeline. She blamed Nathan and Bonnie, although I don't know if that was fair.
Liane Moriarty
#79. Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.
Edith Wharton
#80. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.
Gustave Flaubert
#81. He started toward the entrance. Seriously, how could he not? He stopped when he noticed the girl. She was kneeling in her vegetable garden, her back to Leo. She muttered to herself as she dug furiously with a trowel.
Rick Riordan
#82. He was the god of tide-lap and wingbeat, talon and pearl. She was the goddess of ... herself. And he could not look away from her.
Stephanie Perkins
#83. When Jill woke next morning and found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back in the Underworld.
C.S. Lewis
#84. I am a champion. My mom made sure that I did yoga every day. She dragged me because that was something she was doing for herself. She would have a great time with her friends. All the mothers would sit together and the kids all did yoga.
Rajashree Choudhury
#85. She threw herself across her bed, weeping into a pillow. She knew just what she wanted -- the desire was a fierce ache inside her. But fiercer still was the knowledge that it was beyond the reach of a female.
Libbie Hawker
#86. Somebody ripped their pants open at my wedding, dipping my mother. My mother is not a lady who throws herself into a dip that often, so I don't think he thought she was really going to do it.
Melissa McCarthy
#87. She hesitated before opening the envelope, telling herself there was nothing he could say that would change anything. But she opened it anyway and read the note.
I'm not very good at this. I'm sorry.
Susan Mallery
#88. She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.
David Halberstam
#89. She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.
Don DeLillo
#90. Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past.
Sandra Dallas
#91. Everything is really something else in disguise. Of course she was no exception, she reminded herself. Everybody would assume that she was there as the Childersins' novelty pet, or as a Perfume-detector. Nobody would guess that she was there to look for the person who had stolen her history.
Frances Hardinge
#92. When she returned, she was full of life, impassioned. She seemed to want change, within herself, between them, and she believed all things were possible. She said that the past was not static, our memories fold and bend, we change with every step taken into the future.
Madeleine Thien
#93. There was one she kept reaching for, with a copper-red varnish, and a clarity like the point of a star, precise and loansome, reminding her, somehow, of home. This is the one, she thought to herself.
Kristin Cashore
#94. Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#95. (...) but she soused herself again in the deep satisfactory possession, feeling that what with this and the moon (music that was, the moon), she could afford to leave this man and that pride of his (...) buried.
Virginia Woolf
#96. My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary.
Lynn Johnston
#97. I apologise for my behaviour lately. I haven't ... been myself."
Or she'd just been a part of herself that she usually kept on a tight, tight leash, he thought. But he said, "I understand."
And from the way her eyes softened, he knew that was all he'd ever needed to say.
Sarah J. Maas
#98. In other words she was good at adjusting herself to other people... But tat could also mean she simply lacked the courage to be herself if it meant she had to risk ending up all alone.
Wataru Watari
#99. all that greedy or self-absorbed. Sage's father, cruel as he was, only wanted his son back. Tammi just wanted a sister. I wanted a "normal" girlfriend. And Sage - all she wanted was to be herself. I
Brian Katcher
#100. She was in a mental hospital, and so, she could allow herself to feel things that people usually hide. We are all brought up only to love, to accept, to look for ways around things, to avoid conflict.
Paulo Coelho
