Identity Quotes

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible. It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.

~ Clarice Lispector

What does it mean to not be hidden from the eyes of God even in the womb? What does it say about God that He beheld [David’s] unformed substance? Alone in the field, far removed in both space and time from the overwhelming voices we contend with every day, David came to a remarkable revelation: He was loved simply because he existed.

~ Jonathan Martin

We are the estranged orphans of our nations and tribes, and we now bear the weight not of survival of the group but of personal identity.

~ Chris Matakas

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

~ Milan Kundera

It's funny how you can become something merely by forgetting who you once were.

~ Chrissy Moon

a square is not just about light, air, proportion, and people. It must also give form to some shared notion of civic identity. [Michael Kimmelman, Culture: Power of the Place].

~ Catie Marron

As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.

~ A.l. Kennedy

I had been thinking a lot about how the media has created this complex, fictionalized cartoon version of me, you know, this man-eating, jet-setting serial dater who reels them in, but scares them off because she’s clingy and needy; then she’s all dejected, so she goes into her lair and writes a song as a weapon. I mean, man, that’s pretty intense. And I started thinking about what an interesting character that person is. And, if I was that person, what would my life motto be, my mantra? What would I say? I think I’d own it.

~ Taylor Swift

Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.

~ Reid Hoffman

It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.

~ Kōbō Abe

A group of us were downtown on Bay Street. It was some twelve to fifteen of us with nothing to do. We had just been in a fight with some Kemp Road fellas. It really wasn’t anything to talk about, because we quickly ran them off Bay Street. Feeling pumped up about what we had just done and looking for more action, we started running in the middle of Bay Street, screaming and shouting ‘Rebellions!” and ‘Raiders for life!”, making a real nuisance of ourselves. About nine of us were arrested by the police and charged with public terror and disorderly behavior. So in fact, we were given our gang name by the police, and Milton Street became known as the Public Terrorist Rebellions. Galen ‘Ninja’ Nordelus former leader of the Public Terrorist Rebellions through Milton Street.

~ Drexel Deal

The Rebellions were the first gang in The Bahamas, to come up with a popular logo/brand in the wearing of Raiders clothing. However, other neighborhoods gave birth to their own gangs using popular sporting team images as their official colors and name. You had the Hoyas Bull Dogs out of Kemp Road; the Coconut Grove area took on the name Nike, which became their clothing of choice. Miami Street took on the name Hurricanes, and wore Miami Hurricanes clothing. However, when you look at it closely, because of the lack of involved fathers, a lot of us were simply lacking an image and a positive identity of ourselves.

~ Drexel Deal

I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.

~ Carrie Brownstein

Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I’m touching, so I’d better start paying attention to what I’m touching.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

~ Zadie Smith

Whether you are married or have lived with someone for a time, look upon that person and know that, as much as you may love that individual, he or she is not your better half. Yes, this popular term of this endearment can be a warm, comforting notion that speaks to intimacy and trust. but these people you care about so deeply aren't half of you at all. They do not fill in your blanks. You have no blanks. You are whole within yourself.

~ Larry Ackerman

You can't always choose which. Sometimes you have to BE which.

~ Jonathan R. Miller

Do we have Your Mark 10:39 faith that You will complete what You have begun in us? Or, do we look at our faltering desires and despair or excuse? Let us, Lord Jesus, hear Your Word over us more clearly and emphatically than we hear our own projections. Our predictions come from walking by sight, and they are SO often wrong that we ought to abandon them out of sheer practicality.

~ Brian Eshleman

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

~ China Miéville

Hell, is trying to do what you can't do, trying to be what you're not

~ Anzia Yezierska

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).

~ Milan Kundera

Don't be afraid to be exactly as awesome as you were created to be.

~ Rev. Kellen Roggenbuck

I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.

~ Danielle Dutton

But Krishna was a chameleon.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you're with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved.--Tennessee Williams, Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog

~ James Grissom

You think you must fit the role others have laid out for you. That is the lie you need to conquer.

~ Elizabeth Carlton

She thinks she is white,' they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.

~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

We can name this river, here and now—but we cannot name the water itself. We can name our gods and we can name ourselves, but we cannot name the essence of sacred identity that flows through both, that connects us and sanctifies us. - Alison Leigh Lilly, Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective

~ John Halstead

Our choices define who we are when we make them. Therefore, we always have the power to change and choose who we are.

~ Eda Dagli

If we really want to know, who we are and recognize our identity, we have to find out the identity of the others. By making friends with the others, we are able to make friends with ourselves. At that moment, we can sense how everything falls into place. ( “ Steps in the unknown )

~ Erik Pevernagie

And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?

~ Ernest Becker

From: bluegreen118@gmail.com To: hourtohour.notetonote@gmail.comDate: Jan 7 at 7:23 AMSubject: Re: Really?On the Tumblr-you mean creeksecrets? .....But I really don't think I'm wrong. Jacques a dit. Right?-BlueSo, Yeah, I've been careless. I guess I left a trail of clues. and I shouldn't be surprised that Blue put them together. Maybe I kind of wanted him to.Jacques a dit is Simon Says in French, by the way, And it's obviously not as clever as I thought it was.

~ Becky Albertalli

Sometimes we represent our weakness as if it were bad. We don’t think it’s okay to be weak…We have been injured in many ways and our real self houses all of the evidence of those injuries. The pain, the brokenness and the emotional underdevelopment we all possess is part of who we really are.

~ Henry Cloud

Sometimes I feel that I am destined for greater things, and then again sometimes I suspect that I am just an extra in an epic movie.

~ Shon Mehta

he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate

~ Salman Rushdie

Identity was just a box people liked to put themselves in, a mast to tether to in a storm, a security blanket.

~ Leonardo Donofrio

9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?No. No. No.

~ Ruth Ahmed