Quotes About Identity

Bana iyi görünen bu dünyaya hiç de al??m?? deÄŸilim. BaÅŸka bir dünyada ne iÅŸim var? HoÅŸland???m anlamlar aras?nda kalmay? çok isterdim ve eÄŸer bir ÅŸeyler deÄŸiÅŸecekse, ben en az?ndan, bize akraba bir dünyalar? olan ve ayn? ÅŸeylere sahip köpekler aras?nda yaÅŸamama izin verilsin isterim.

Si ahora se acercara el arcángel, el peligroso, detrás de las estrellas, si bajara dando un paso sólo y viniendo de allí: hacia arriba latiendo, nuestro propio corazón nos mataría. ¿Quién sois?

Jatts, Rajputs, Gujjars, Gakhars and others—accepted Islam during the Sultanate era

I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.

Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the common people. But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.

I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

I can hear you say, What a horrible, irresponsible bastard! And you're right. I leap to agree with you. I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?

Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.