Quotes About Identity

I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house.

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.

Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice

It's approximately the same if you're a Jew," the rabbi said, "although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you like it or not. It's more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.

Aveva perso le tracce di ciò che voleva, e poiché una persona è ciò che vuole, si poteva dire che avesse perso le tracce di se stesso.

He'd come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he'd met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for living.

since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person.

the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person.

My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!

By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.

His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of

Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.

So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans .

Esa no era la persona que él creía ser, o la que habría elegido ser si hubiera tenido la libertad de elegir, pero había algo reconfortante y liberador en ser una persona real y definida, y no una colección de personas potenciales y contradictorias.

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self.

He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

Her face and hair were on the verge of confirming a wicked little dictum of Leila's: Blondes don't age well. (Leila saw middle age as the Revenge of the Brunettes.)