Quotes About Identity

Listen to me ... and I want you to remember this. Your legs are part of you, but not all of you or what you are. So wherever we go after tonight, I need you to know that you are no less for the injury. Even if you are in a chair, you still stand as tall as you ever did. Height is just a vertical number - it doesn't mean shit when it comes to your character or the kind of life you live.

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.

A person is from wherever they feel best, and roots are for plants. Everyone knows that, don't they?

they talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you are.

This world presses in on us from every side; it scatters fistfuls of our dust across the land and takes bits and pieces of us as if to water the earth with our blood. What did we do? Why have our souls rotted away?

Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo ...

You never know who anybody is. Even the people closest to you.

Mabel Rose Chen was a perfect daughter. She knew this because everybody said it. ... The thing about being a perfect daughter was that nobody suspected you might not be so perfect. That maybe you were fascinated by the fact that you belonged to this powerful family, and maybe you weren't so great at violin or tennis or French, but you were very, very good at spying.

Why does Switzerland look like one big cuckoo clock to me? Dan asked. Because you have no sould, Amy answered.

Had he really lost his childhood? Was that what the Clue hunt had done?

Nancy Mairs, in Remembering the Bone House

Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

Irigaray remarks in such a vein that the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of "slave morality.

We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.

Destruction is thus always restoration—that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.

Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with "being a man," others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.

The exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject.

If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power...the subject exceeds the logic of non contradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were.

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.