Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn't tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian's and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn't wracked with anxiety when there aren't any boys around. And she doesn't need them to live, which is what it feels like for me.

I believe in you my friend, so much so, that if any of my ideas make you feel belittled in any manner, I want you to rise against me and throw my work into the fire. Any notion, any book, any institution that weakens the self instead of strengthening it, must be discarded at ones.

Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars.

I can be anything you want but definitely not a wannabe.

I cannot love my neighbour as myself because you bid me do him no harm, and I cannot love my enemies because they keep crawling inside me and tearing out all my emotions: if I am made in your image then you are not somebody I want to see because why believe in the broken, why depend on the weak, why seek the lost and bewildered whose only answer is “please”?

I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.

I can see us there still," he said, "for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them," he said, "despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.

I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification. I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)

I can't speak to whether vegetarianism is healthy. But as Alcott realized, it offers something that other diets cannot: an identity. Once can be a vegetarian, while most other diets are something one can do. He recognized that a diet wasn't merely how one ate, but how one lived.

Citizen is one of those books that reminds me that black life is often like walking a balance beam: It requires strategy and concentration for stability is so fleeting.

Ich bin die Asche einer Glut, die ich nicht war.

I checked my words carefully. Words more powerful than atom bombs and more cutting than AK-47s. People are fragile and words, not bullets will break them, and once they break every part of them spills out. Their soul, spirit, identity, ugliness, and their beauty. It’s all there, right in front of you if you know where to look. Most people see the ugly and I didn't want to become that. I thought I looked for beauty but then wondered why I often say such ugly things.

Citizen is one of those books that reminds me that black life is often like walking a balance beam: It requires strategy and concentration for stability is so fleeting. -- "To Be a Citizen" by Morgan Jerkins

Closed mouths don't get fed While I couldn't yet articulate a concept like representation, I identified with Grace's compulsion to emulate... It was the same yearning I felt to emulate Tyra Banks... Oprah Winfrey... They showed me how I could expand when I didn't feel like enough. I didn't have to be just like them, but their quiet guidance and encouragement afforded me space. In simply being themselves, they widened the room. -- "Amazing Grace" by Carla Bruce-Eddings

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.

I cut off all my hair, cut away at the soft curves of my clothing until I have edges once again, using my body like broken glass to slice at the world around me. I have to take something back, because I have nothing more to give. Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?

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.

Identify your life mission and gift

Identity is not the face, Identity is not the trait, Neither is it the success pace, Nor is it the personality grace. Let alone it being your cliché phrase, Or did you think, It’s some religious faith? My child, it’s alarming that it’s none, It’s even not tongue, Then how can it be, what problems you have overcome And the person you have become! This confused the little girl, and she was amidst a complex whirl, of thoughts, ideas and questions…. What is it then, Father? You have declined already, all that mattered. I can think no more, of what makes an individual’s identity? Help me through, Help me carefully. (Poem: Identity, Book: Ginger and Honey)

Identity is not the face, Identity is not the trait, Neither is it the success pace, Nor is it the personality grace. Let alone it being your cliché phrase, Or did you think, It’s some religious faith? My child, it’s alarming that it’s none, It’s even not tongue, Then how can it be, what problems you have overcome And the person you have become!

Identity was everything, but it seemed I never had one. (Jessica)

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

Identifying someone by his, or her, outward appearance is often the first and most common error in the world

Identity is the role you chose to play in the story of the Universe.

Identify the sequence of stages that leads to turning your dreams into reality

Identity politics is killings free speech on campus, silencing Muslim women struggle, boosting both Islamism and the far Right and pushing reconciled Muslim voices to the fringes. It makes implicit assumptions about Islam - from an Islamist, Left or Right- perspective - and insists all Muslims must adhere to that definition or be regarded not truly Muslim. It ignores the fact that most ordinary Muslims are not in favour of a violent and that in surveys and polls they support British values more than the general UK population. Yet the myth persists that the ideology of Islamism is the true expression of what it means to be Muslim.

Identity was a liquid state, ever interchangeable, and adaptable to its surroundings... It was better to not have favourites - a snake didn't mourn when it had to shed its skin.

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

I didn’t even have a name for her, shade or human, but I didn’t need one to know her. (Eric)

I didn’t share their pain. I didn’t share the pain of the children being bombarded in the region I came from, I didn’t share the cry of the Arabs, the liberty chants of the good and the gay and the faithful, the audacity of the newcomers with a champions’ mentality to pioneer and innovate and excel in a foreign country harboring average hopes for the lot of them, or at the very least, the majority of them.

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.

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

I do not care what I labeled, as long as I am heard.

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random...that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again." -p150, NOTES TO SELF

I don’t feel right about money. Remember, Anisim brought me new roubles and half roubles before the wedding, on St. Thomas’s Sunday? I stashed one package away then, and the rest I mixed in with my own … When my uncle Dmitri Filatych, God rest his soul, was still alive, he used to go for goods all the time, now to Moscow, now to the Crimea. He had a wife, and that same wife, while he went for goods, as I said, used to play around with other men. There were six children. So my uncle would have a drink and start laughing: ‘I just can’t sort out which are mine and which aren’t.’ An easygoing character, that is. And so now I can’t figure out which coins are real and which are false. And it seems like they’re all false.” “Ah, no, God help you!” “I’m buying a ticket at the station, I hand over three roubles, and I think to myself, maybe they’re false. And it scares me. I must be sick.

I don’t believe in influence. I think that in order to be an artist, you have to move. When you stop moving, then you’re no longer an artist. And if you move from somebody else’s position, you simply cannot know the next step. I think that everyone is on his own line. I think that after you’ve made one step, the next step reveals itself. I believe that you were born on this line. I don’t say that the actual footsteps were marked before you get to them, and I don’t say that change isn’t possible in your course. But I do believe we unfold out of ourselves, and we do what we are born to do sooner or later, anyway.

I don't know if I believe this but that's what it felt like: As if we were to people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

I don’t identify as transgender. But I’m clearly gender not-normal. I don’t think even lesbian is the right identity for me. I really don’t. I might as well come out now. I identify as tired. I’m just tired.

I don’t know who I am. And I don’t think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question. Who am I? So, I am a mystery to myself. I am someone who is in this pilgrimage from the moment that I was born to the day to come that I’m going to die. And this is something that I can’t avoid, whether I like it or not, or — I’m going to die. So, what I have to do is to honor this pilgrimage through life. And so I am this pilgrim — if I can somehow answer your question — who’s constantly amazed by this journey. Who is learning a new thing every single day. But who’s not accumulating knowledge, because then it becomes a very heavy burden in your back. I am this person who is proud to be a pilgrim, and who’s trying to honor his journey.

I don't like this, Toua," I go on. "We're like birds that have flown a very long way from their nest. We're like nettles in a garden full of hops. We shouldn't have to hide who we are. Our faces are unseen.

I don't feel as though I'm a blessing, but at least I can choose not to be a curse.

I don’t know who I’m supposed to be anymore, and I’ve always known who I’m supposed to be.

I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be," Dove considered his prospects calmly, "all I know for certain is I'm born a world-shaker.

I don't own you, you just belong to me.

I don’t subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we’re all the same and race doesn’t exist. It’s a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we should concentrate on similarities is that they’re ignoring glaring parts of our humanness—our skin, perhaps the color of our hair, the way we speak, or even the shape of our eyes.

I don't want beauty, I want identity.

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

I don’t understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.

I don't want to lie about who I am, even if it doesn't matter. It's who I am. It's part of me.