Identity Quotes

Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

~ Roberto Bolaño

I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

~ Roberto Bolaño

The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there.

~ Margaret Wheatley

Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.

~ Milan Kundera

I'd like to say I'm not self-absorbed compared to others, but that's hard to say since I'm far too self-absorbed to pry into others' self-absorption.

~ Anonymous

What I wasn’t expecting was the euphoria once my body began releasing endorphins. The mixture of pain and pleasure was ecstasy. Getting my tattoo introduced me to secret, dark pleasures. I would always be a marked prisoner, but I was a liberated soul.

~ Scarlet Risque

In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness-- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.

~ Ron Suskind

If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I'd never known I'd had.I was no longer following a trail.I was learning to follow myself.

~ Aspen Matis

You express yourself through written words. You’re a writer.

~ Tara Sue Me

It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.

~ Maryse Condé

Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn’t. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn’t help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.

~ Bianca Scardoni

But nobody writes fairy talesabout the ugly and poemsare not there for the brokenand I will never find myselfin the words of a hymnnor will any whispered prayerever say my name(which name, which meam I looking for?)because I am shoutingat a cross splintered into piecesby my angry fists, and cryingat the stained glass fallinglike killing rain around me.

~ Miriam Joy

I want her sinful arms wrapped around me,bloodied and angry and triumphant in shame.

~ Miriam Joy

Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.

~ Stephen Vincent Benét

By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

~ Fernando Pessoa

You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?'…'I don't agree

~ Carson Mccullers

In July I thinkabout the idea of being cursed(because it’s not strange to me;when I look in mirrors I’mnot there, blank walls gleamingwith bloody condensation,and my shadow behind memocking me with his persistencewhen I keep telling himto leave just to leave to let me be).

~ Miriam Joy

In May I keep count.Two and a half more days of school,five between exams.Twenty thousand words of a noveland four poems and six borrowed books.More numbers to add to counting my pillsand trying to work out how to stay awake.

~ Miriam Joy

I cut off all my hair, cut awayat the soft curves of my clothinguntil I have edges once again,using my body like broken glassto slice at the world around me.I have to take something back,because I have nothing more to

~ Miriam Joy

All your life has been a journey to find an identity.

~ Larry Kramer

This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.

~ Rudyard Kipling

We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.

~ Neil Gaiman

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

~ Chang-Rae Lee

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

~ Chang-Rae Lee

The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.

~ Chris Campanioni

I cannot love my neighbour as myselfbecause you bid me do him no harm,and I cannot love my enemiesbecause they keep crawling inside meand tearing out all my emotions:if I am made in your image then youare not somebody I want to seebecause why believe in the broken,why depend on the weak,why seek the lost and bewilderedwhose only answer is “please”?

~ Miriam Joy

Some people unfold into a thousand wordsand others never speak to me at all,never take the blame at all,never look at me at all – I wonder whyhe never looks at me at all (perhapshe cannot bear to meet my eyes).

~ Miriam Joy

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

~ Rick Perlstein

And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren’t meant to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.

~ Kate Bornstein

She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

There comes a time when you just have to say, “No!” – to the requests and to the system.

~ Fennel Hudson

She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.

~ Robin Mckinley

Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.

~ Orson Scott Card

Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality

~ Norman Spinrad

Reverend Harper: Have you ever tried to persuade him that he wasn't Teddy Roosevelt?Abby Brewster: Oh, no.Martha Brewster: Oh, he's so happy being Teddy Roosevelt.Abby Brewster: Oh... Do you remember, Martha, once, a long time ago, we thought if he'd be George Washington, it might be a change for him, and we suggested it.Martha Brewster: And do you know what happened? He just stayed under his bed for days and wouldn't be anybody.

~ Joseph Kesselring

Wouldn’t a no one do as well as a someone about whom nothing can be said?

~ Johnny Rich

We usually don't realize the thing that is defining our identity until that thing is taken away.

~ Tim Hiller

Choice is the mortar that binds together the things that make us who we are.

~ Fennel Hudson

You can be many things if you are British and still belong.

~ Robert Hillman

The reason why man seeks for happiness is not because happiness is his sustenance, but because happiness is his own being; therefore in seeking for happiness, man is seeking for himself.

~ Hazrat Inayat Khan