Quotes About Identity

All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. We'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time... -Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

You always dread the unfamiliar...We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself-- ~Something Wicked This Way Comes

I don't belong with you. I've been an idiot all the way

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid.

we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

But that was another Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy.

It doesn't have to be the greatest. It does have to be you.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame.

Business or profession?' 'I guess you'd call me a writer.' No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, Does it really belong to me? Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

no man's a hero to himself.

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. May I ask you a question? Yes. Have you ever thought you were Christ? I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean.

Be your own self. Love what YOU love.

It is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world.

And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?