To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.