Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

It turns out that knowing how loved we are by God makes all the difference in the kind of people we will become.

It was all very isolating to think about, what people use to define themselves and their actions. And at the end of the day, did it make people feel better? Maybe it did. Maybe it gave them something to grasp at in the ambiguous vein of life on Earth.

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now, and I'm not letting go.

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage -- the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72)

It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.

It wasn’t just heartbreaking but it broke my identity! All that anguish that was deep hidden in me because rejections from family and friends started to pour out like a current in the sea that would seem destructive.

It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.

I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life.

I’ve been thinking about it, since you said it,” said Seivarden. No, said Mercy of Kalr. “And I’ve concluded that I don’t want to be a captain. But I find I like the thought that I could be.

I’ve heard of movie stars and Pop Idols getting plastic surgery to change their looks drastically, but I’m not sure if I would want to do something like that,” I said. “I prefer to be natural…the way I was born.” Auntabelle nodded in agreement. “I’m all for technological and medical advancement but when it comes to altering yourself so much because you don’t like the way you were born or because you simply don’t like yourself the way you are, that you become a completely different person, then I’m not in support of it. I wouldn’t want to use my technology to alter someone so much they are no longer their own self.

I've never felt the need to find out who I am, where I come from, or why I was abandoned. I know who I am, where I come from; most of all I know that I wasn't abandoned. Kidnapping might be too strong a word to use for how our adoption transpired, but sometimes that's what it felt like.

I've never been a good representation of me.

I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless.

I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD. I see the pink faces in suits look over top of my head. I watch myself disappear in their eyes, their tesses. I talk loud but still I don't exist.

I wanted to be that, The one which was vast, The one which laughed, The one which surpassed, Yes, which also collapsed. True, it was abstract. I wanted to be that. I still, want to be that!

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

I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.

I want to say, Don't bother asking me anything. I want to say, There is nothing underneath.

I want you to be able to see me, and as my love for you is so much of me (all of me, making me more than myself) then you must see that too.

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

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.

I was an abusive, selfish, needy, angry asshole. Now I'm just kind of selfish, a little less angry, occasionally needy, with flights of asshole. I've grown.

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.

I was bi and my heart was off-limits to no one, at least not for any reason like what they had between their legs or whether their chests were flat or round. And maybe because of that I never really could believe or understand that Griff, or anyone else, could be deterred from falling in love by such a trivial thing as gender.

I was a slave to my own darkness, believing in my false created, thought-identified identity so much that it forged what felt like a wasteland of a reality.

I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.

I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me...

I was finished with assuming the best intentions of those who abandoned me, done trying to assuage my loneliness in barren places.

I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.

I was thinking about how part of your self can be in a place while at the same time the most important parts are in different place, a place that can't be accessed via your senses.

I was overlooking the heights and I felt somewhere in between!

I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

I was trying to work out who I was.

I went to the club to escape my life and pretend I'm somebody else. Now I don't know who I am anymore.

I will be me, when world aberrantly will feel, my gravity! I will turn into my, when their shrill cry will stop asking why! (Poem:Because you so wanna meet me, Book: Ginger and Honey)

I wish I could change everything about myself but it's just—it's too late to do anything, that's the problem. It's all so fucked up, and I just don't who I am anymore, you know? Like, who is this person who made all these choices that I just have to live with? I look back at that person and I hate her, I hate her so much for what she did to me, that person is like my nemesis, my worst enemy, but the problem is, that person is me.

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I’m not interested in controlling others but I’m invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don’t do many face-to-face interviews. I don’t like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I’m the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be.

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality— all simply store workers.

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?

I wish I knew who I am," I whispered to the stars in Baya's eyes. Slowly, Baya shook his head. "Oh, Dust Girl, that's the hardest wish of all. Not even Baya can give you that one. That one you earn.

Literature is the haven of fluidity, of slippage from one character to another, of movement. Women tend to read far more novels than men do, perhaps because this kind of ambiguous floating and flirtation is just what a self-protective masculinity needs to keep away from.

Listen, listen. I can explain. There's a bad Ted underneath the good Ted, yes, but then, under that, there's a Ted who's good for real. But no one ever sees him; his whole life, no one ever has. Underneath it all, I'm just that kid who wanted nothing more than to be loved and didn't know how to make it happen, even though I tried and tried and tried.

Loving yourself is courage!

Living by other people's definitions and perceptions shrinks us to shells of ourselves, rather than complex people embodying multiple identities.

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Love is beautiful, and He looks amazing on you!

Love is blind. Love of money is blind. Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles. ( "Money rocking and rolling" )