Jean Rhys Quotes

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

Everyone thinks you have to grow up to know who you are, but kids already know who we are. The world just beats it out of us.

Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you.

We are so ruled by what people tell us we must be that we have forgotten who we are.

Once you don't have freedom and you're obliged to do many things you don't want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be - and you can lose yourself.

Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are.

Every child is born with tremendous love for himself. It is the society that destroys that love, it is the religion that destroys that love - because if a child goes on growing in loving himself, who is going to love Jesus Christ? Who is going to love the president, Ronald Reagan? Who is going to love the parents?

The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves. But if we look at our lives we will see that most of the time we do things just to please others ... The worst part is that most of us are not even aware that we are not free.

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child.

Some people become dullards, but as children we are all creative. It's in the programming, the socialization, that we lose our sense of play.

You have ideas planted in your head, thoughts you never had before, that tell you how you have to act, how you have to dress and who you have to be. I have been trying to push back, to be authentic, to follow my heart, but it can be hard.

We have killed our souls with comfort instead of seeking fulfillment and achievement.

I think you're always policing yourself by trying to do what you think would be "cool" and accepted by other people, until you start to figure out who you really want to be. Growing up is an ongoing push-and-pull of you being yourself and you performing to what society expects you to be.

I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.

You learned that it was easy frighteningly easy to get lost in someone else's life accommodating him and stop being yourself. You learned to be wary about falling in love. And you learned that someone who loved you could stop loving you for some dark reason and even though that was bruising you were more resilient than you knew. Eventually you would get over it more or less.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control, It begins with your family, and soon it comes round to your soul. Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned: When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned.

It's so important to raise people to grow up to be who they are and not be forced to be who they're not. What an awful thing to do to people - it's like being in prison.

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

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

I came upon a child of god, He was walking along the road And I asked him, where are you going And this he told me: "I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band I'm going to camp out on the land, I'm going to try an' get my soul free.

The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.

It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.

The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

To be conformed to this world is to risk the loss of one’s eternal soul.