Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

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

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

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 trying to work out who I was.

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 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 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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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" )

Loving yourself is courage!

Lydon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.

Mais nous croyons que l'esprit reconstruit ses souvenirs sous la pression de la société. . . que celle-ci le détermine à transfigurer ainsi le passé . . // But we believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. . . that this causes the mind to transfigure the past . . .

Mammals require three essentials in life, identity, stimulation, and security, and by far the most important of these three psychological cornerstones is identity.

Mange af mine egne tror – ligesom jeg – ikke på Gud. Men det er den samme Gud, vi ikke tror på. Det er meget vigtigt!

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth

Many people will not be honest because they fear loss of intimacy and togetherness. In reality, honesty brings people closer together, for it will strengthen their identities. The more you realize your separate identities, the closer you can become. Telling loved ones what is really on your mind and telling others what you really think is the foundation of love.

Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God…" he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question.

Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.