Robert Penn Warren Quotes

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I used to be someone.

I am bigger than the box I'm in.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

I've tried actively to define myself and redefine myself, and not be pigeonholed.

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

We are constantly creating ourselves by what we move toward or away from.

I know what my identity is.

If you are not something, how do you become it? It is not obvious to me that you can be something you are not.

What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.

I might not ever fully know who I am, but I also believe that I could be whoever I want, whenever I want.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

Everything is what you make of it, even yourself.

The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads?

I decided to be what crime made of me.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.