“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

"I want everything" http://home.earthlink.net/~2lulah2/everything.htm in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108
Context: I don’t know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.
Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.
But these are the people who never get it.

Source: Katie McGrath and Andrea Brooks Interview: Supergirl Season 5 https://www.showbizjunkies.com/tv/supergirl-katie-mcgrath-andrea-brooks-interview/ (September 23, 2019)

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 6, “The Where It’s At and the Whyfore It Should Be There” (p. 26)

Source: The Angel Experiment

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

"The Teacher"
Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Context: "You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."