Identity Quotes

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

~ Frances Mayes

One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

~ Barack Obama

I look like vanilla pudding so nobody knows that on the inside I am spider soup.

~ Andrea Portes

It’s scary telling someone you care about, someone you love who you really are.

~ Eric Jerome Dickey

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

~ Paula Hawkins

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

~ Clarice Lispector

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino, after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

~ Nick Joaquín

Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.

~ David Levithan

He wished he could be anywhere else and anyone else but Here and Him.

~ James R. Silvestri

Looking for who I am is who I am.

~ Tom Spanbauer

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.

~ Muriel Barbery

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

~ Michel De Certeau

Once upon a time black male “cool” was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a “poor me” victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others.

~ Bell Hooks

To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive...

~ Malcolm X

At least when one speaks of oneself one is passionate, well-informed and specific.

~ Jan Neruda

Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.

~ Bell Hooks

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

~ John Powell

Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.

~ Christopher John Farley

We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, “Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine.” So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there’s a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination.

~ Bell Hooks

...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

~ Erving Goffman

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.

~ Bell Hooks

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

~ Miguel Syjuco

o•cean (ˈōSHən) n. pl. -s. 1. The endless part of yourself you never knew but always suspected was there. [2015, Whittier]

~ Nicola Yoon

Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.

~ Ellen Raskin

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you

~ Neil Gaiman

Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?

~ Kelli Jae Baeli

Behind every mask there is a face, and behind that a story.

~ Marty Rubin

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.

~ Wilhelm Reich

It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.

~ Frantz Fanon

Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity.

~ Mary E. Pearson

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.

~ Bell Hooks

The end comes to all of us...but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?

~ Christopher John Farley

I was a rule-follower. I obeyed all forms of authority. I had never before encountered a situation where the authority was clearly wrong and I had to stand up for what was right.

~ Linda Kage

I know who I am, and I know who you are, and nothing else matters. it's how we live our life.

~ Tal Mcthenia

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

~ Alain De Botton

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

~ Nicole Krauss

Questions from earlier circle like buzzards. Am I running away or moving forward?

~ Doug Cooper