Quotes About Identity

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Kalau Kristen jangan kebarat-baratan, kalau Islam jangan kearab-araban

Making money is not gonna change anything about what I am, except I won't answer the door.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind most of our colors are amazingly the same.

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.

It's not just a matter of having lost the land and the wealth that came with it. It's a matter of the fact that we lost a way of life that we should have been able to pass on to our children and to their children, but which we can't because of what was taken from us. (Harris Neck, Georgia native Wilson Moran as quoted by Aberjhani in The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

Community makes us all. Secret society breaks us all.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

We live as Ethiopians and die as Ethiopia.

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be…

Het modernisme rust niet voordat het van de vrouw een man en van de man een vrouw heeft gemaakt, en, alle onderscheid nivellerend, het leven doodt door het onder de ban van de eenvormigheid te leggen.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I'm much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often, if not always, expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.