Quotes About Identity

First, a man is created in his own image, and only afterwards in the image of God.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

Now, please don't tell me you don't care about how you look and that there's more to you than your appearance. There are two kinds of people in this world : people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved. I am Raskalnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize.

Me? I was lost for long time. I didn't make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. […]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.

To write is to know that you are not at home.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.

Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You're an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.

How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care.

I am my family's appendix, its unnecessary appendage.

Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe.