Identity Quotes

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

~ Madeleine L'engle

What we know matters but who we are matters more.

~ Brené Brown

The greatest courage is to love, to reach beyond the self openly, to expand the very idea of self until it is too large to be named. All other courage is false courage. All else is hiding, a desire for protection.

~ Ashavan

Compromise is a choice. As is the defence of one’s self.

~ Fennel Hudson

Yeah, I'm a drug addict. And a prostitute. The whole world knows. Not because I robbed my own family. Not because I ended up behind bars. Not because I've been hassled by the cops when soliciting customers from a local street corner. Not because I'm shooting up in the public bathrooms at your city park. Everyone knows because I told them all. I never tried to hide any of it. I never felt the need to.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

People might consider you eccentric for being different, but this is good. Leaders and visionaries are not conformists afraid of standing out.

~ Fennel Hudson

If you want to be happy you have to study people who are happy. You have to hang out with people that are happy. Life won't go in the direction you want, by simply trying to stay positive in a life you're not happy with. You have to know what you want and why you truly want it so badly. When you figure that out then you need to change your current identity, in order to fit the type of person you envision would make those dreams come true. Happiness is not reliant on the actions or inactions of other people. It is your “courage in motion” toward your dreams.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Don't let what you thought you were yesterday keep you from becoming what you're meant to be today.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it's up to you to have the courage to make good.

~ Radclyffe Hall

What I do is the truest mirror of who I am.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?…If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

~ Donna Tartt

I invented you the way I like but I have fallen for you the way you are.

~ Pushpa Rana

That’s what artists and athletes do day in and day out. Whether you see them at work or not the process is ongoing. They are working to achieve their heart’s desire to either enlighten or entertain anyone who cares to watch or listen. Some of them achieve glory but others just do it because they love to and they are driven to.When something, anything, interferes with that desire, their sense of self is jeopardized and they have to struggle to hang on to their identity. That’s the real cost involved in producing a painting, writing a novel, or hitting over .300 for the season.

~ Richard Marcus

Despite the restrictions, we are safe within (the Box). But – and here is the problem – once we identify something more, that awareness irrevocably changes our perceptions of the Box.

~ Heidi Reagan

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

~ Donna Tartt

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.

~ Christopher Priest

There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

~ Christopher Priest

The moment was surreal. A sometimes-autistic young man with two identities lecturing a room full of zombies on feelings and realities.

~ Jonathan Friesen

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

He sees her looking at him with interest, and is encouraged to go on. 'I wouldn't be here with you now. This wouldn't be real - something else would. You'd have been another you, instead of the one you are now. You can't be tied down to a predestined fate when you change according to your situation, and your fate must change too. Everything depends on circumstances - on which you you happen to be at a given time...

~ Anna Kavan

We are more than the person who wakes each day. We are the dreams of the previous night and the nightmares of the week before.

~ Shaun Hick

Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken reality of our old identity.

~ Eric Samuel Timm

Someone once asked me how I hold my head up so high after all I have been through. I said it's because no matter what, I am a survivor NOT a victim.

~ Patricia Buckley

Feelings are something you have, not something you are.

~ Shannon L. Alder

There is a real joy in being truer version of yourself.

~ Mahrukh

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

~ Milan Kundera

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes I wonder if I'm nothing more than the sum of who [my parents] were. Even worse, I worry that I don't add up nearly so well, that I'm just a shadowed reflection of them. Now that question hounds me a lot more often than I like to admit.

~ Cooper Davis

Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Leto said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.

~ Frank Herbert

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?

~ David Mitchell

And yet, as she sits there with him on the window seat, with his strong arms around her, she knows that if she can survive crying, then there are other things she can survive too. And that if some things are lost to her forever, there are others that she has not yet begun to experience. She knows too that what she wants is not because passion is the natural antidote to grief, but because it is the most natural, most perfect, most complete expression of what she feels for him.

~ Julia Hoban

... instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

~ Lauren Slater

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

~ Lauren Slater

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Identity was everything, but it seemed I never had one. (Jessica)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

I didn’t even have a name for her, shade or human, but I didn’t need one to know her. (Eric)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Anyone could be anybody. (Eric)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.

~ Abigail Tarttelin

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

~ Betty Friedan