Quotes About Identity

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.

That is not the point," he said. "I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.

We are so costumed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. "Suit yourself, yo," he said, in his "gangsta" voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the "yo") as he got up and roll-walked out. "Nigga gotz to eat.

you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.

Percebi que me imaginara, durante anos, em outro local mas que, na realidade, permaneci lá o tempo inteiro

liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Whe can't escape who we are

those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn't really look like a wedding ring—or maybe it wasn't a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic

Às vezes queremos o que queremos mesmo sabendo que isso vai nos matar. Não podemos escapar de quem somos.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

I knew my mother's feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

because the thing he hadn't understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism

but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.

Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed-for the first time ever-a Teen Girl: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given.

III. We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Harriet felt as though one of the gruesome transparencies of Your Developing Body-all womb, and tubes, and mammaries-had been projected over her poor dumb body; as if all anybody saw when they looked at her-even with her clothes on-were organs and genitalia and hair in unseemly places. Knowing that it was inevitable (just a natural part of growing up!) was no better than knowing that someday she would die. Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.

Yet even in death, my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture– for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.

It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact.

Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.

And now here she was again, like an apparition, drinking red wine from a plastic cup and calling me by name.