top of page
.png){kind=small}
"She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement-a rebellion. I didn't try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive."
Standard
Customized
More
"Well it's because the record companies are pumping away with their commercial stuff. I think it's a shame."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I felt ashamed.""But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?""No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal.""But how could you help that?""Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I've found the best treasure... You."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Shame is a child of custom rather than of nature."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nobody can stop you but you. And shame on you if you're the one who stops yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"O shame! Where is they blush?"
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country's Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be."
Transformation
"Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing-able-to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me-and to save me-but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."
Empowerment
"But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was."
Truth
"My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn't looked toward it. I wasn't lost. I'd always known the way. If I'd only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared."
Destiny
"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."
Transformation
"I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family-two unsent letters-I wrote: I am the director of my life."
Responsibility
"If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad-if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law-it would become my law."
Self-Control
"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."
Tradition
"I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me."
Empowerment
"I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it-that "nineteen" didn't matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal."
Mortality
bottom of page