Quotes About Identity

If I'd been somone 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.

The center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me.

There is noting wrong with not understanding yourself.

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.

Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life.

My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity.

Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?

It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.

The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster.

It made me start to wonderif there were other people so loney so close. I thought about Eleanor Rigby. It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family's primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents' marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.

Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself.

she saw through the shell of me into the center of me … She went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me

I am a mother, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity.

Herschel was a Jew. And he was my best friend. He was his best friend. And I murdered him.

And was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose.

None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I?

I understand, now, the tragedy of my childhood. It wasn't the bombing. It was that I never once liked a photograph of myself. I couldn't.

Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.

Do you know that I am the Gypsy girl and you are Safran, and that I am Kolker and you are Brod, and that I am your grandmother and you are Grandfather, and that I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you and you are me? Do you not comprehend that we can bring each other safety and peace? When we were under the stars in Trachimbrod, did you not feel it then? Do not present not-truths to me. Not to me.

Lo que olvidamos de los animales es lo que empezamos a olvidar de nosotros mismos.

So, then why am I your son? Because Mom and I made love, and one of my sperm fertilized one of her eggs. Excuse me while I regurgitate. Don't act your age.