Quotes About Identity

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

It's so hard to express yourself.' I understand this.' I want to express myself.' The same is true for me.' I'm looking for my voice.' It's in your mouth.' I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.' Something you are proud of, yes?' Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary

If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

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

My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

My feelings have never once cared about what they should be.

I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.

How did her life live itself without her.

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think - while you think, while we think - our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.

I hit the spacebar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.