Brenda Ueland Quotes

Once you've started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can't turn back. The universe doesn't allow it.

Everybody goes through their life in different ways. I definitely am having my journey. It evolves and changes. At some moments, I feel totally off center and trying to find my way back.

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best. -Deuce, (183)

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that, well, I hope, for the sake of God, that you have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don&'t change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing, its knowledge should be expanding.

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of peopleMaybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

There are moments where you stop living, if you stop changing, and if you stop seeking growth of some sort.

I learn a little more and I change a little bit

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I did not lose myself all at once.

Change is the end result of all true learning. Change involves three things: First, a dissatisfaction with self - a felt void or need; second, a decision to change to fill the void or need; and third, a conscious dedication to the process of growth and change - the willful act of making the change, doing something.

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes - in writing or in life - and do not fret about them but pass on and write more.

Journeys bring power and love back into you. If you can't go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self. They are like shafts of light, always changing, and you change when you explore them.

I'm a different person today than I was yesterday. I live for the moment and everything that happens in my life changes me.

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation.