Quotes About Identity

I'm done with trying to be perfect. A perfect body belongs to somebody else - and it's not me.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

My father belongs to Berhampur and my mother is from Uttar Pradesh.

In politics, when you wake up, you can make out who belongs to which party. In cinema, you cannot make out who belongs where. Everybody looks like your friend.

For me the French team belongs to the past.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

If no one knew that I was trans - let's say that I made it very, very far. Let's say I went to the UFC and became a UFC champion, even, won the belt title, took it home and no one ever knew - that would be great for me.

A woman and a dress, very often, fight against each other because they are not at the same place. Sometimes you see the woman moving the belt around. She is making the robe her own. She needs that. Otherwise, the dress doesn't exist.

I'm not religious. But I grew up religious in the Bible Belt.

No existe nada como "yo", "mí" o "lo mío" a lo que aferrarse.

Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.

When you begin to question the narrative of yourself and inquire as to who is even doing all of this talking inside your own head, you may come to realize that you have no idea!

I am large! I contain multitudes!

Imagine forty-five years of profound teaching distilled into one sentence: "Nothing is to be clung to as 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.

Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Such ertramp, master of his own destiny.

He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with out fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.

emotions among the British—pride, patriotism, nostalgia

But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a "slag heap"—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a "serious" climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world's highest mountain.

Fifty-four-year-old Tom Green is a fat, bearded man with a receding hairline, thirty-two children, and five wives

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. —JAMES BALDWIN

In the charged and complicated spheres of identity, politics, philosophy, and power in America, though, racism was not situational but systemic.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows