Quotes About Identity

Si uno dedica su existencia a gustar, y si adopta la imagen atractiva necesaria para ello, sea la que sea, se suele creer que uno ha desistido de ser querido por ser quien es en realidad. Y si uno consigue manipular a los demás para gustarles, será difícil no sentir cierto desprecio por esas personas, ya que han caído en el engaño.

he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: To feel as if he couldn't survive without a woman made a man feel weak; And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

Jonathan Franzen

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.

Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now.

Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator

Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.

Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you, or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who's not missing?

No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there's ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.

It's easier to be a character in a story than the star of your own tragedy.

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?

I never confused what I had with what I was.