Quotes About Identity

Die Menschen, die dich umgeben, sind ein Teil von dir. Ihr habt eine gemeinsame Geschichte. Sie können sie sogar mit dir gemeinsam schreiben. Und wenn du einen verlierst, verlierst du damit ein Stück von dir, egal wie du ihn verloren hast.

Please understand: I wear glasses. This was no place for a man with glasses.

Naciste original, no mueras siendo una copia,

Fucking black was fucking exotic. And America loves to fuck exotic. Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember!

Et c'est quoi la différence entre art et culture? L'art n'arrive que si on met sa culture en danger

on n'est pas forcément du pays où l'on est né. Il y a des grains que le vent aime semer ailleurs.

L'accent, c'est l'émotion d'une langue.

I realize I didn't write those books to describe a landscape, but to continue being part of it.

Un Québécois: C'est un individus prêt à mourir pour une langue qu'il ne cherche pas à bien écrire.

Ce qui est sûr c'est que je n'aurais pas écrit ainsi si j'étais resté là-bas. Peut-être que je n'aurais pas écrit du tout. Écrit-on hors de son pays pour se consoler? Je doute de toute vocation d'écrivain en exil.

Sebbene lo Stato si ostini a dare un nome alle strade, la gente stabilisce i propri punti di riferimento in maniera del tutto autonoma. Una chiesa, una casa abbandonata, un parco, un edificio pubblico, uno stadio, un cimitero: qualunque cosa può andare bene. Ognuno insomma finisce per inventarsi una sua personale mappa urbana.

Altijd heb ik die foto van Carole Laure bij me. Een gulzige mond en vochtige ogen (...) Carole Laure in mijn bed. Carole Laure die een heerlijk negermaal voor me bereidt (rijst en kip met kruiden). Carole Laure die naast me zit en met wie ik samen in deze smerige, luizige kamer jazz beluister. Carole Laure als slavin van een neger. Waarom niet? (p.21)

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.

Origins sure are powerful and sh*t. You can't shake them.

I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.

My father's subject: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an 'excretion' of his or her environment. That's the word he uses. Excretion.

She looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.

she immediately became the person they believed her to be: a peculiar, impatient girl, attractive enough yet too old and odd for the village boys who had once been her friends.

Pretty much all my life I've wondered about my birth parents, wondered who they were, what they were like. But since I had my children, I don't wonder anymore. Because I look at my kids, and I can see the answer. It's right there in their features, in who they are. Everything that isn't Rick and his family must be from my side. It's my kids who are finally showing me where I come from.

Your problem is that you're Russian - you don't know how to be happy.

Be sure it's your real self you're showing. Because it is your real self that needs to be loved.