Quotes About Identity

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to "outlive" them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn't quite enough.

It was a very American story, somehow. 'Lost.' Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.

Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.

You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.

A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.

In slow drowning waves the knowledge washed over Cressida, her professor did not think that she was so special after all. He didn't know her father Zeno. Was that it?

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.

You love the life you've lived, there is no other. You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

I wasn't so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn't so special.

She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14, nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus.

we're sick of ourselves.

No I don't, no I reject that I reject you, I am not your sister, I am not your twin, I am not you.

First thing is when your on Death Row long enough you don't ask WHO AM I because you have learnt nobody would be there anyway.

Della riendo, diciendo entre jadeos: «¿De qué vale ser una perdida y una puta si a los treinta años no tienes nada?». Y a Norma Jeane le faltaban

Annabel was devoutly religious. She could not have clearly stated what set her Presbyterian faith apart from other Protestant faiths, or, except in the most obvious terms, how it was to be distinguished from Roman Catholicism, an old and much-feared enemy;

I am snatching at things to prove my life.

For it has been revealed to me as a fact, that where the dull-essential nature of our lives is eliminated, such as age, identity, education, employment, place of residence, family ties, daily routine, etc., the thrilling-essential is revealed.

Você pode fingir ser quase tudo que não é, há pouquíssimas coisas que de fato se pode ser.

No has fracasado, aunque no hayas estado a la altura de la exaltada idea que tienes de ti misma.

You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.

Joyce Carol Oates