Identity Quotes

Variety may be the spice of life, but consistency pays the bills.

~ Doug Cooper

I’m like a fish in a pool, turning quickly to avoid what challenges it. My only decision is whether to go right or left to sidestep confrontation.

~ Doug Cooper

When compared side by side, my days can barely be distinguished from one another. The only difference is what I do after work and with whom I do it.

~ Doug Cooper

Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.

~ Charles Stross

No matter what you do, you are that girl. It's how you become that girl that matters.

~ H.m. Ward

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

~ Sara Sheridan

Now I feel free, and hope is creeping back. Maybe because I'm paying attention to what I have rather than what's missing.

~ Doug Cooper

There's nothing like an orgasm to force a person to think--and more often than not, to think too much.

~ Doug Cooper

There's nothing like an orgasm to make a person think--and more often than not, to think too much.

~ Doug Cooper

Word has traveled quickly that just because you're on island doesn't mean you have to be stranded---as long as you have cash.

~ Doug Cooper

Rationalization is foreplay with one's conscience.

~ Doug Cooper

Our selves are are rough and unrehearsed tales we tell the world.

~ William Alexander

All that remains is to forge the #commitment. Regardless of how right everything feels, words never last.

~ Doug Cooper

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.

~ Walter Benjamin

Appearances can be deceiving, but the true colours of your soul remain.

~ Angelica Hopes

The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.

~ Marie Ndiaye

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.(148)

~ Thomas Lewis

We are identified and known by the sort of fruit, the quantity of fruit, and the quality of fruit borne out in our daily conversation, conduct, and character. There is no greater criterion for Christians. It is the paramount gauge of God's people.

~ W. Phillip Keller

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.

~ Sheena Iyengar

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?

~ Neil Gaiman

Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.

~ Amy Leach

Social class positioning influences all aspects of everyday interaction – how to talk, if to talk and when, whom to trust, whether or not to plan or risk, what can or cannot be done, how to belong, and who to be. Of course, how people respond to these social interactions depends on how social class intersects with the meanings and practices associated with other significant sociocultural categories (gender, race, ethnicity, age, cohort, religion, geography, sexual orientation) that also influence psychological tendencies.

~ Susan T. Fiske

I felt good that, although there was no future, there would always be a past.

~ Stephen Reid

Everyone has a unique problem of their own, an issue that follows them throughout life and never goes away. You discover it early and go on to struggle with it for the rest of your life, almost until it eventually becomes an old enemy that you lose the will to fight or hate anymore. And just as every person has their own void, their own haunt or their own unanswered question...they also have the power to turn it into a legacy every bit as profound as they make it.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.

~ Neil Gaiman

She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.

~ M.r. Graham

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

~ Eric Metaxas

(...) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.

~ Milan Kundera

Being who you are for ever is the price you pay for im­mor­tal­ity.

~ Hannu Rajaniemi

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural.

~ Tom Clancy

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

~ Frank H. Wu

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.

~ Evelyn Waugh

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for a moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.

~ Aldous Huxley

the man eventually becomes what he dreams ofBy T. Afsin Ilgar - Ted`s Tale

~ T. Afsin Ilgar

Maybe the hardened clay was not as ugly as I had thought. Maybe what I resented was the color my father had painted me. The time had come to sand away some of that dreadful stain.

~ Zohreh Ghahremani

My best works are for me. Not for the world.

~ Anirudh Arun

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

~ George F. Will

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

~ Richard Rohr

[Caine]Interesting. Me, I've always wanted to know who my real parents were.[Sam]Let me guess: you're secretly a wizard who was raised by muggles.

~ Michael Grant