Identity Quotes

But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl.

~ Emma Cline

I checked my words carefully. Words more powerful than atom bombs and more cutting than AK-47s. People are fragile and words, not bullets will break them, and once they break every part of them spills out. Their soul, spirit, identity, ugliness, and their beauty. It’s all there, right in front of you if you know where to look. Most people see the ugly and I didn't want to become that. I thought I looked for beauty but then wondered why I often say such ugly things.

~ Bruce Crown

Female competition is when you are with a guy you like and you look around, see a girl who is prettier than you standing nearby, and think to yourself: I wish she wasn't here. -This is what happens when you attach your identity and sense of worth to the amount of male attention you receive.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

The most tragic thing anyone could ever say to us is “Oh – you're a Christian? I had no idea!” It is not who we say we are, but how we are recognized. Let's remember, “In Antioch the disciples were first called Christians “ and By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Dear brothers and sisters, let our walk match our talk and be doers of the word...

~ Pastor Steve Bainbridge

Forget the face of God, and forget your own name is Beloved.

~ Ann Voskamp

We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.

~ Edmund Campion

The Bible does not deny that we were various things—addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators—but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _____ and I am an X Y or Z.” The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed.

~ Paul O'brien

I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. Christian ethics goes steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature: the first will be last, to him who asks give, turn the other cheek, judge not. Identity on the other hand appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous “us” on one side and on the other a “them” who are very doubtful indeed, who are in fact a threat to all we hold dear.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

~ Gustave Flaubert

There’s a drive in a lost soul—in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful.

~ Doug Cooper

...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

~ James Hillman

More often than not we forget to give time to ourselves; we are so caught up in our daily lives that we ignore our wants, desires and wishes. Don’t lose your identity in this busy world; don’t give false promises to yourself saying that you will live it up once you have reached a certain level. Don’t put your career ahead of yourself otherwise you will either break down or burn out. Take time off for yourself and the right time to do that is NOW. Self care is just as important, if not more, as your career goals. You can do justice to your daily life, your career, your ambitions and your dreams provided you are well and alive. So now on create the ME time, nourish your soul and make self care your main concern.

~ Latika Teotia

The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Pretend that you are the soul inside everyone you meet.

~ Tom Bliss

You're like a gem shining ever brightly in an ever dimming world.

~ Zechariah Barrett

Study the nature around you, but also within you.

~ Fennel Hudson

A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations.

~ Suzy Kassem

The structure of our identity determines how we show up as a leader, how we deploy ourselves into circumstances.

~ William A. Adams

You were born an original work of art. Stay original.

~ Suzy Kassem

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

~ A.s. Byatt

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

~ Chris Kraus

I can certainly identify with The Villain. A Villain is someone who has a past, who is strongly opinionated, fearless, doesn't get intimated by anything, and went beyond suffering. It's an empowerment figure.

~ Nuno Roque

I love the idea of reincarnation, so just in case it doesn't exist, I decided to be different people in the same lifetime.

~ Nuno Roque

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

~ Diriye Osman

Books are not distractions. Rather, they are, and have been, the most profound and accurate mirrors man has ever crafted.

~ Rj Arkhipov

Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Mirror mirror on the wall, show the real me or naught at all.

~ Gautama Buddha

I want topeel away all the labelsI had once given to othersand place themupon the fabricof my own identity.They have reflected back to me,everything that I refuseto See in myself.

~ Meraaqi

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

~ Hugo Hamilton

I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.

~ Takeshi Shudo

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

~ Maggie O'farrell

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

~ Nick Joaquín

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.

~ Diana Abu-Jaber

I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.

~ Catherine Lacey

I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Digging through my roots to understand the way my branches grew.

~ Saleem Haddad

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

~ John Ciardi

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.

~ Amartya Sen