Quotes About Identity

Bowie himself said, "Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity."2 After reviewing his troubled early years, British psychologist Oliver James wrote, "What seems to have been the trigger for his shift from distressed and tortured to emotionally healthy, was his adoption of personas in his musical career."3

Tis hard to live in a world where all look upon you as below them.

And am I answerable that thoughtless and unprincipled men exist whose shades of contenance may resemble mine?

My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That's what my parents called me. I also got 'Teddy Ruxpin' a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out 'James Franco' my junior year of high school, I didn't correct her.

It was not, as some suggest, Calvinism that made Scots hard: it was Scottish character that made Calvinism, already congenial to the national spirit, even more rock-ribbed than its Genevan counterpart.

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

You mean how do I know you are who you say you are?" Merle shrugged. "How do you know anybody is who they say they are?" She shook her head. "We lie to ourselves about who we see, we lie to ourselves about who we are. Then we buy our own lies and try to spend them as our lives.

If not me, who?" "Who? You're Condor, not an owl.

Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.

takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.

What people think about God, Jesus Christ, and the Church cannot be separated from their own social and political status in a given society.

Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade.

We want people to realize you are at a design school, not a land grant college. The way we look says a great deal about who we are.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche...

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual.

Mom, you're not going to let him name him, are you? That's favoritism, and I'll be traumatized if you do.

Who do you see when you think of you? Are you an outsider, Cool, distant, angry, swimming against the current, or are you in the flow? When they tell you, This is who you are, do you say yes or no? Who do you see when you look beyond the skin and the surface, when you drift to sleep, when you are the person no one else knows? Who are you on the inside? Don't answer these questions. Not yet. First, open your eyes, your mind, your heart. See.

Joe: Oo, Brittany "Aren't I Fabulous?" Hobson? Addie: She's not that bad. Joe: Brittany "All the Boys Like Me, I'm so Popular I Could Die" Hobson. Addie: Joe!

Who do you see when you look at them? You know the ones I mean: the others, the olders, the youngers, the ones who are not you, not like you or your friends, who wear the labels you give them until they give them back, saying, I believe these belong to you.

Maybe this is what it's like for all only children: To love the family that isn't almost as much as the one that is.