Quotes About Identity

Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.

The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story.

Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

I learned, the field of interest was a man from Wales who could recognize all his sheep as individuals but couldn't recognize human faces, not even his wife, not even himself in the mirror.

He perdido el buen nombre, la parte inmortal de mi ser, y solo me queda lo más bestial.»

Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill

All violence {is} a person's attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I hadn't realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)

aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and

I asked Mercedes what sorts of people gathered on 4chan. A lot of them are bored, understimulated, overpersecuted, powerless kids, she replied. They know they can't be anything they want. So they went to the Internet. On the Internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.

they saw how well behaved I was, and decided it meant I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad." I

shameworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world

if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.

The judge took one look at it and threw it out. He said the honey trap was "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind"; the idea of "a psychological profile being admissible as proof of identity in any circumstances [was] redolent with considerable danger." And

all violence being a person's attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

He said that as it happened he was a gay porn star and if I wanted to know more about his work I should google him. I did and immediately saw many close-ups of his anus.

Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. —DAVID ROSENHAN

I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That's tribalism.

I happily played the clown, Because I am a clown.

Not only do you lose a person to death, but you lose their noise too—their noise and smells, gestures and facial expressions. You lose the way they talk and phrase things and laugh, the way they fill in your blanks without ever thinking about it or having to try. You lose things you love about them they don't even know they possess.

In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it. The

It's easy to believe in yourself when you're lying, because you're talking about someone else