Quotes About Identity

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

I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

My voice had no home until her.

I feel at home in my rituals.

I am Raskolnikov. 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. Like the bullet, I too stray. Forgive me.

Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.

the need to belong to a party, any party, is greater than the fear of appearing stupid once again,

Joseph Roth ends Flight Without End with the sentence: "No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he." I beg to differ. No one in the whole world is as superfluous as I. Not Franz Tunda, Roth's protagonist, no. I am the one who has no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, not even any self-love.

Why is it that you live in such a place yet consider the world so dangerous?" "I'm an American.

My Existence is Uncomfortable for People

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.

Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

There are two types 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'm a failed narcissist.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn't dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn't dream of becoming a giant - I wasn't that delusional or arrogant - but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget.

You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wasting away and life was leaving you piecemeal, your soul no longer fit your body, you hated it and I hated it and I couldn't recognize you and I couldn't see you and I was frightened and I never knew what to do, I looked for the man I love in you and I searched for who I used to be around you and I couldn't find either.

From Pessoa: "Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me.

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

I'm not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

Look at the way things are now. Just a set of crab in barrel and all of a sudden one crab just appear with a jacket and tie and telling everybody that he is not a crab any more. Ridiculous little place with ridiculous little people.

The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform... Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrifice

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.

Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.