Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

Hell, is trying to do what you can't do, trying to be what you're not

He loses his power when we know his face.

Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

Her voice became vibrant and raw, veined with passion. "You can never go back to the past. You can't heal their wounds or your own. Even God will not do this for you," and this was a bit controversial with her audience, but she believed she had proof: "Jesus himself was not healed--he came back from the dead with the wounds still in his hands and his body. He came back changed, but not healed. Saying 'I'm sorry' is saying that you will be different from now on. Your identity stretches to accomodate this thing you did to them. And in this way a relationship is formed between the person you have hurt and yourself.

He sees her looking at him with interest, and is encouraged to go on. 'I wouldn't be here with you now. This wouldn't be real - something else would. You'd have been another you, instead of the one you are now. You can't be tied down to a predestined fate when you change according to your situation, and your fate must change too. Everything depends on circumstances - on which "you" you happen to be at a given time...

He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.

...he still thought I was accusing him or calling him to account. He said, "People *do* grow. You may not think much of *me*, but my children will be great!" I said , "They will be black and blind or passing for white and self-blinded. Those are the only choices.

He thought he vomited out his soul. If ghosts were made of ectoplasm and ghosts were basically souls without bodies, then it was perfectly logical that the green mess all over the ground was his ectoplasmic essence.

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that he had to speak. But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.

He was sorry for himself as well, for he was doomed to find life and identity in death letters.

He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics.

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

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.

Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

How could I explain that it was not all playacting? That I felt more of the male spirit within me than the female - a fierceness that whittled me down to a sharpened spear of ambition. And as a boy, I was applauded, not punished, for such raw energy. It was not beaten out of me for my own good, or worn away by women's chores.

How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?" "You'll have to test me out." "You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it." "Rain," I say. "That's not your real name." "Does it matter?" "Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real." "That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living." "And?" "And"-- she shrugs--"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that.

How do you eat your roots?

How much of my body is really me? My face is me, for sure. Anyone who looked at my face would know it was me. (...) But after that? If I showed myself a picture of myself from the shoulders down, would I be sure it was me? (...) I close my eyes and ask myself what my feet look like. I only kind of know. (...) I let it define me, but I can't even define it.

how lovers alter in the glance of each other, that space where their moods are accepted and their surrender is never taken advantage of.

How she would push her identity further down into a cacophony of fiend-infested darkness where she couldn't hear her proper voice anymore, just pleasing those who demanded a distorted version of her.

How's my hair? Is there trouble in the west wing? (Refers to large curls.) These are actually my lungs. My Aquanet lungs. They kick in on the high notes.

How would I know which one I was?

Humikab ang dagat na parang leon masarap sanang tumalon pero BAWAL MAGTAPON NG BASURA sabi ng alon.

Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.

I am a cultural Frankenstein

I am a cultural Frankinstein

I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

I am a complicated person with a simple life.

I am a living breathing word of GOD.

I am a worried person with a stressed out soul, living a simple life with no capital.

I am everything what u see and I can be anything what I want to be.

I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out.

I am forty. [...] I know who I am. The treachery of possibilities that threaten to swamp a young guy -- I negotiated them. I'm on the other side. The safe side. Why then do I remember the perilous moments with such fond affection?

I am living a simple life with a complicated mind and I have yet to find a state of mind where I feel safe with who I am, where I am, with what I do.

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

I am not a thing. I am not your possession. I am a human being." - CBI Agent Sam Rose

I am neither I nor the other one I am something in between

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

I am not myself. My thoughts are tangled in words that are not my own.

I am myself when I get up, I am myself throughout the day and I am myself when I go back to sleep, you probably might have met someone else when I was asleep and claimed it to be changed me.

I am not a neurotic!" "You're trembling with nerves and sensibility—" "Of course I am, I'm an artist!

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

I am not the number or beautiful face on your black board as you want to give identity to me ! I am me . I am my identity .

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.