Identity Quotes

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

~ Paul Auster

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

~ Zadie Smith

Remember that every person who you come into contact to on any given day has a story that is probably far more amazing than you will imagine and no one is going to just offer up their entire life's worth of experiences to you because you want them to. It takes time to draw someone's story out from within them. It takes trust. It takes sincerity and dedication. Keep in mind that each and every interaction you have with all those people on a daily basis is a unique opportunity to develop any kind of relationship with that person that the two of you might want to be a part of. It doesn't matter how you meet them or what it is that you do with them. It can be as mundane as waving to them in the morning as they leave their driveway, or it can be as huge as saving someone's life in a moment of uncertainty and sacrifice. Each person has the potential to become a friend or a lover or to simply teach you something important and then slip back into the endless rush of other bodies moving about the planet around us. Don't pass these chances up too often, or you'll get lost in the tide yourself.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

~ Alain De Botton

Lovers are not snails, they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

~ Jerzy Kosiński

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy...If I try self consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals

~ Madeleine L'engle

As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

So, Eva Nine, you must sometimes disregard what someone is saying and focus instead on what they are doing. Watch and observe. That is when one reveals his true self.

~ Tony Diterlizzi

When you know who you are, you know what to do.

~ Shelley Hendrix

Our identity has already been chosen for us; but it is up to us to accept it, or fight and change it.

~ Afnan Ahmad Mia

But Sir Alistair’s gaze was different. Those other men had looked at her with lust or speculation or crass curiosity, but they hadn’t been looking at her really. They’d been looking at what she represented to them: physical love or a valuable prize or an object to be gawked at. When Sir Alistair stared at her, well, he was looking at her.

~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming.

~ Epeli Hauʻofa

...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...

~ John Geddes

Our identity is like that of an onion; with each experience we endure, a layer is peeled away, finally revealing who we really are at the core.

~ Afnan Ahmad Mia

Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.

~ Amy Hill Hearth

Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us?

~ Cecil Castellucci

...you became lost in the maze of me - forgive me Love, for keeping you close...

~ John Geddes

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

~ Anne Rice

You can't change who you are, can you? That would require changing the people who made you along the way. That would mean discrediting everything they ever gave you.

~ Rose Christo

Peter. The fine hair along her spine rising, Vicky could feel the power in a name. This is who you are, it said. Come back to us.

~ Tanya Huff

I understand perfectly. Darquesse isn't a separate entity. She isn't another person. She's you. If you make the wrong choices, if you stop loving the people who love you, if you allow the world to twist and turn and change you, then yes, the future we've seen will come to pass. But if you fight, and if you kick, and struggle, and refuse to give in to the apathy, or the anger, or the hopelessness, then you'll change the future, and you'll walk your own path. And I'll be right there beside you, Valkyrie. I'll always be beside you.

~ Derek Landy

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.From within, I couldn't decide what to do.Unable to see, I heard my name being called.Then I walked outside.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

~ Virginia Woolf

Everything is music for the born musician.

~ Romain Rolland

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard

~ Douglas Coupland

There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.

~ Amy Reed

You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.

~ Susan Abulhawa

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

~ Kate Chopin

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.

~ Kunal Sen

Being human makes us one. Being uniquely ourselves makes us individual. - Nancy S. Mure, Author of Unidentical Twins

~ Nancy S. Mure

We live in one world together. It's more important than ever to be friend to all.

~ Elizabeth Miyu Blake

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

~ Richard Rohr

Ladies, no matter how hard you try, a man will never complete you. Only God can. And if you don’t know your identity in Him, you’ll be lost forever.

~ Deborah N. Kabwang

His [(Rumpelstiltskin)] feeling that his name, which is his identity, must be kept secret, or else he'll be revealed to the world as the hunchbacked, shriveled, ridiculous creature he knows himself to be. And if that happens, he'll disappear.

~ Joan Gould

Cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say, as I wear not motley in my brain.

~ William Shakespeare

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

~ Marcel Proust

a criminal sketch of Christon a diner napkin-'Poet Prophets

~ Amber Koneval

They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.

~ Tania James

. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.We can't be anything we want to be.We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

~ Steven Pressfield