Quotes About Identity

Mein Inneres reibt sich am Außen.

And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.

I am a very sad person. 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.

Despite the near-constant regret he felt about being himself, he never confused himself for the problem. The problem was the world. It was the world that didn't fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world?

From the unemployed Sloucher Lumpl W, who reclined on Passover not because it was religious custom but because why should that night be different from all others?: I'm not the greatest person that ever lived, but I would be a good father, and you know it.

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

Julia Bloch: 43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

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

Mencils?" "Pencils for men.

Yankel's lipstick autobiography came flaking off his bedroom ceiling, falling gently like blood-stained snow to his bed and floor. You are Yankel. You love Brod. You are a Sloucher. You were once married, but she left you. You don't believe in an afterlife.

Oskar: I'm God! Thomas: You're an atheist. Oskar: I don't exist!

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Who's Norma Jean Mortenson?" "Marilyn Monroe!" "Who's Marilyn Monroe?" "Sex!

What do you think is going on?' 'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides 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 outside.

The ground is still filled iwth rings, and money, and pictures, and Jewish things. I was only able to find a few of them, but they fill the earth. The hero did not ask me once what she was saying. I am not certain if he knew what she was saying, or if he knew not to inquire.

I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!

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. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered—our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure . . .

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.

What do you think is going on?' 'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my out-sides.' 'Do anyone's insides 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.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.

I am blind. I am supposed to be retarded.

Jonathan Safran Foer

It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.

I walked through Long Island City, Woodside, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. 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.