Losing Oneself Quotes

“I won't ever say I'm a good person. I don't want to be. I like who I am - and I don't want to lose that. I don't want to lose me. Because it felt like that's what happened to all of them. They'd lost themselves to their monsters.”
•pg.332 - Kovit”
― Rebecca Schaeffer, Not Even Bones

“I can’t recognize myself
lately;
I’m someone I used to know.
I think you took me with you
and I was hoping you could
just leave me somewhere else,
because I’ve been waiting
for myself,
waiting for all the pieces
to come home.”
― Robert M. Drake, Black Butterfly

“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“He swallowed heavily, and just under the surface, that broken, shattered look lurked, trying to press through his thin veneer of composure. But now she could see it wasn't a fatal break, it was the kind of break that was in her own soul too. The kind of break that stemmed from too much loss and betrayal, and you could either let the world break you or you could storm through the world and fill the cracks with the blood of those who'd hurt you until you were a semblance of whole again. Maybe not the same person, but still you, still alive, still moving forward on your own."
•pg.94-95 - Nita's thoughts”
― Rebecca Schaeffer, When Villains Rise

“I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned me in a strange place & I had to find my way back home-I thought I could do it blind, the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back to where it belonged.”
― Laura McHugh, Arrowood

“One gets away with a lot when one is in an unchallenging relationship or is too busy to invest in one at all. Mostly, one gets away from oneself.”
― Donna Goddard, Circles of Separation

“A silver lantern sat before Eanrin, there in the depths of the pit. It was small and delicately wrought, and in its heart glowed a light more potent, more beautiful, more colorful than starlight.
Eanrin recognized it at once: Akilun's lantern, the fabled Asha. A gift from beyond the Final Water, crafted in the realm of the Farthest Shore. Akilun himself had died grasping it in his hands.
"And so I might die," Eanrin whispered. "So I might lose myself.”
― Anne Elisabeth Stengl, Starflower

“Oh, Biarritz, your nocturnal dance seduces me, beckoning me to surrender to the pulsating rhythm of your streets, to lose myself within the tapestry of your nights!”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days