Quotes About Identity

Bir o gözüne, bir ötekine bak?yor, her birinde kendimi görüyorum: gökkuÅŸa?? zindanlar?nda ufac?k, minicik bir mahpus...

Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

Picture this: a human finger, cut from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

I am alone. It is evening. There is a light fog. The sky is covered by a thin milky-golden tissue. If I only knew what is there—higher. If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?

The natural road from nothingness to greatness is to forget that one is a gram and to feel that one is one-million of a ton!

the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

Who knows who you are . . . A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end

Is it not clear then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?

But how explain all of myself, all of my sickness, recorded in these pages? And I subsided and walked obediently. ... A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls downward, but on the way it whirls, catches at every familiar branch, fork, knot And I, too, was catching at every silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the blue spire of the Accumulator Tower piercing a cloud.

If only I had a mother, the way the ancients had. I mean my own mother. And if for her I could be —not the Builder of the Integral, and not number D-503, and not a molecule of the One State, but just a piece of humanity, a piece of her own self, trampled, crushed, outcast . . .

To be original means to distinguish yourself from others. It follows that to be original is to violate the principle of equality.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

When a people does not honour its past, it lives in a present of little substance and faces a future clouded in doubt.

To say we know a person is to write that person off.

I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.

Parenthood is not some special currency," Iris said. "Being a parent is not a status thing." "Surely they're superior in one way? They've done things we've been unable to do." "What, procreation? The turkeys do it. All those dogs and cats do it. Your bees, too. Fuck and breed.

she knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen's novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly.

It was not about keeping a man; it was a lesson on how not to become an ugly woman.

I would have liked to be called a dreamer had I known how to dream. The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasional feel so I find untrustworthy. I would not mind being taken as many things I am not: a shy person, a cheerful person, a cold person. But I do not want to be called a dreamer when I am far from being a real one.

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?

Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else's thought