What are you talking about?" Narcissus demanded. "I am amazing. Everyone knows this.""Amazing at pure suck," Leo said. "If I was as suck as you, I'd drown myself. Oh wait, you already did that.

If I simply look at the map that I’ve so tediously created, it will explain why I’m laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up.

Patriotism is the narcissism of countries.

I'm everything that you're not.

The assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all I’ll be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what I’ve failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of myself living for myself that in the end I’m really left with very little of myself, and that is unimaginably frightening.

I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending or this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life.

If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker.

The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.

Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.

In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

No other being is lesser human than the one who thinks of others as such.

I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, I’d be wise to develop the habit of following my nature.

Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist's need to bolster his or her self-esteem through grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, and feelings of entitlement.

Courage is God's way of testing the virtues you profess to have and your level of commitment to everything you think you are.

This conversation with myself has an overwhelming aroma of narcissism.

If I am indeed my own god, I’d better start praying to myself to get myself out of myself.

People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.

The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.

I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.

If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.

If I can’t quite figure out what an ego is, all I have to do is look for the thing that’s killing itself in the very act of feeding itself.

If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.

If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.

Ego is borne of the need to ‘prove’ oneself instead of making the choice to ‘be’ oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.

If I’m conceited enough to believe I’m invincible, then maybe it will take me doing the very thing I swore I would never do to understand that I’m not as wonderful as I thought I was.

People that have been consistently hurt by others in life will only see the one time you hurt them and be blinded to all the good your heart has to offer. They look no further than what they want to see. Unfortunately, most of them remain a victim throughout their life.

It’s thinking that I had the solution that probably created the problem in the first place.

I'll never miss a chance to remind you of what a brat you were. A gloriously beautiful and very spoiled brat. I was utterly charmed by your complete self-absorption. It was rather like courting a cat.

We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?

There came a time in my life when I had to admit to myself that I have some very clear narcissistic tendencies. Ironically, it occurred during the writing of my book The Emotionally Abused Woman. As I listed the symptoms of narcissism, I was amazed to find that I recognized myself in the description of the disorder.It should have been no surprise to me because I come from a long line of narcissists. My mother and several of her brothers suffered from the disorder, as did her mother. For some reason, though, I imagined that I’d escaped our family curse. I should have known that it’s not that easy to.

To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.

I spend my life constantly calling in ‘imaginary’ debts that aren’t owed to me in order to avoid the ‘real’ debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.

Sacrifice” and “self” both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that.

I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending of this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life.

The biggest impediment to loving life is our inflated egos. Only by suppressing our ego and controlling our selfish thoughts can we truly comprehend the immaculate beauty of every day unfolding before us.

An obese ego is just about the heaviest thing you’ll ever carry. So maybe you should stop feeding it.

You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.

Love in the service of self is greed in disguise.

If I’m asking what kind of ‘return’ I should be expecting on the sacrifices I’m making, I have in that question revealed the need to ‘return’ that question to wherever I found it and have the word ‘return’ edited out of it.

I used to hold grudges until I realized that most people are narcissistic and their actions are driven by an unhealthy self-interest and not maliciousness towards me.

...some people become hypercritical when stressed.Then again, he hadn't been stressed last week. She giggled, remembering how he'd instructed her on the proper way to fold hand towels. Talk about nitpicky. Perhaps this would be a good time to call it quits.

You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are wounded and in need of healing.

Often, her mate is the child of a narcissist, already indoctrinated to regard exploitation and disregard as love. Others lured by the narcissistic aura are those in whom healthy childhood exhibitionism has been repressed. . . . If the parent puts the child to shame for showing off, the need for attention gets repressed into the unconscious. Repression means that the need is not satisfied and continues to press for expression in the adult without her being aware of it. The repressed adult may select an exhibitionistic mate to achieve vicarious satisfaction.

To love others you've got to love yourself, but I love myself too much I've got no place for others.