Identity Quotes

Alan, you seem to think we won't like you unless you do things just like everyone else. Have you ever thought we might like you because you're different?

~ Tamora Pierce

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you've been granted.

~ Susan Cain

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

~ Janet Frame

All you need to validly be bi is to identify! It's so true it rhymes.

~ Ashley Mardell

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.

~ Ken Kesey

who are youreally?you are not a nameor a height, or a weightor a genderyou are not an ageand you are not where you are fromyou are your favorite booksand the songs stuck in your headyou are your thoughts and what you eat for breakfaston Saturday morningsyou are a thousand thingsbut everyone choosesto see the million thingsyou are notyou are not where you are fromyou arewhere you are goingand i'd liketo go theretoo

~ M.k

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump, you may be freeing him from being a camel.

~ G.k. Chesterton

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

~ Gustave Flaubert

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.

~ Eckhart Tolle

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

~ Kate Morton

Be not another, if you can be yourself.

~ Paracelsus

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

~ Alain De Botton

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

~ Beryl Markham

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life. ~ Bran

~ Patricia Briggs

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

~ Jean Baudrillard

I won't sleepif that's what it takesto not wake upas myself

~ Casey Renee Kiser

We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.

~ Winston S. Churchill

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

~ Michael Ondaatje

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage -- the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72)

~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

~ Eckhart Tolle

I'm learning quickly, once you quit one thing, it gets easier and easier just to leave situations rather than deal with shit.

~ Doug Cooper

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.

~ Thomas Merton

I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

~ Raquel Cepeda

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose.

~ Tony Kushner

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

~ Nick Joaquín

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' 'The way I want it?' 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?' 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.' 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.' 'Mess it up how?' 'Forgot it.' 'Forgot?' 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.

~ Toni Morrison

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American...

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?

~ Scott Turow

If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.

~ Kamila Shamsie

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

~ Roland Barthes

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

~ Virginia Woolf

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.Without them, we are empty.

~ Daisy Whitney

Everyone has an identity. One of their own, and one for show.

~ Jacqueline Susann

I've never been impulsive. It's always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn't matter anymore.

~ Brenna Yovanoff

He that commends me to mine own contentCommends me to the thing I cannot get.I to the world am like a drop of waterThat in the ocean seeks another drop,Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:So I, to find a mother and a brother,In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

~ William Shakespeare

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

~ Henry David Thoreau

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

~ Amin Maalouf