Quotes About Identity

No. I was not okay. And neither was James Baldwin though his essays Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight To assert humanness in a black and white world.

History will always find you, and wrap you In its thousand arms.

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.

The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.

Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. We were all haunted.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

I have forgotten the reason, forgive me. I have forgotten my name in the language I was born to, forgive me.

And why," she asked, "Do you call yourselves America? This hemisphere is one body, one person. She is America.

I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day.

Our knowledge is based on the origin stories of land, genealogy and ancestors. If you know the branches of the tree of relationship between tribal clans and family members, then you know who you are, said the panther to its cubs.

Be who you are, even if it kills you. It will. Over and over again. Even as you live.

I've learned there are many genealogies. Within our family is a genealogy of rage. There is also a genealogy of justice. I would show you a map, but I am still searching the roadway for casualties.

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.

As I started a new life in Arizona, I knew I was losing myself. Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy.

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

I was anything but history. I was the wind.

Sometimes it is like facing the dreamer who knows the you of blood and stars—

Or maybe you are my own life scheming desperately to climb back in.

By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.

Her own daughter was born, like she had been, in either place or all places, so she could leave, leap into the sound she had always heard, a voice like water, like the gods weaving against sundown in a scarlet light.

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich live in tall glass houses at the edge of it.

Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.