Quotes About Identity

If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother's life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.

and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male... The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better- would have been right, would have been how it ought to be- had I been a boy.

Not to have been born in a woman's body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn't see his own freedom because he couldn't conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him... The wounded don't survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival...

replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

I said I wasn't sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain.

Benim aç?mdan, kad?nlarla erkeklerin öyküsü, son tahlilde bir savaÅŸ öyküsüdür.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was. 'I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,' he replied. 'You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,' he added, 'it would be much worse the other way around.

I'm not remotely interested in me as a subject," she said. "I'm interested in me as an object, and my honesty isn't brave, because it's not for me, it's not about me. It's just that I'm all I've got.

Abraçou o conceito inteiro quase da noite para o dia: podia decidir como queria ser e então sê-lo. Não existia predestinação alguma; agora entendia que aquela noção de si mesmo como uma sina e uma maldição que havia pairado como uma mortalha sobre toda a sua vida podia ficar para trás.

Tudo que sabe é que não se reconhece mais nesses contos, embora recorde a sensação explosiva de escrevê-los, algo dentro dele se adensando e fazendo uma força irresistível para nascer. Nunca mais teve essa sensação; chega a pensar que, para continuar escritor, teria de se tornar escritor novamente, quando poderia com a mesma facilidade se tornar astronauta ou fazendeiro.

Why do you play at being a woman?

I don't know,' I said. 'I don't think I know how to be a woman. I believe that no one ever showed me.' 'It isn't a question of showing,' he said. 'It's a question of being permitted.

I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised.

I remember when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that 'second place' pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence.

and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman's body.

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted.

The parts of life that are suffocating', Angeliki said, 'are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents' own desires

The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world.

That idea – of one's own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo