“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”

— Anaïs Nin

Variant: She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.
Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Anaïs Nin 278

writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“But when returning into herself she [the soul] reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

“She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

“She walked and walked, daring to be happy, risking the wrath of the Gods. She raised her large smiling face to the sun and when she was not struck down, dared to hope for herself again.”

Susan Ruth Johnson (1959)

Page 145.
Hungry Ghosts (1996)

“The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: One Minute Wisdom

“She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 11, “Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope” (p. 146)

“And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(XIV.4) Del Rey, p. 473
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

“This is how she shows herself a woman indeed,
My lady, and I reproach her for it:
She does not want what one ought to want,
And what she is forbidden to do, she does.”

Bernart de Ventadorn troubador

Can vei la lauzeta mover, line 33; translation by Frederick Goldin, from Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (1983) p. 440.

“She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

“And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

A Closed Eye (1991)

“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”

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Anaïs Nin 278

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