Quotes About Identity

we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

Estamos tan acostumbrados a disfrazarnos para los demás que al final nos disfrazamos para nosotros mismos.   FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

every great painting is really a self-portrait

Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (" 'Russian Jew' contradiction in terms," he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. "To Russian mind anyway. Since 'Jew' to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.") Grisha had been born in Sevastopol, which he claimed to remember ("black water

Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember the Erinyes?

I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like 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, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart.

And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It's not about the outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care all about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right reasons? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet- for me anyway- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

America was a special country, because, despite the diversity of our racial, religious, and ethnic origins, we were all one nation, one people with a shared set of values and a common culture.

American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, "that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, 'This is the real me!

These statements of belief are consonant with the assumption of pluralist thought that if people do not exclusively identify themselves with a single category—such as class, occupation, or system of belief—political cleavages will be limited in intensity.

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.

Free women, said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be, he said, obstinately. But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.

I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad. "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

On nous définit encore, même les gens les plus évolués, en fonctions de nos relations avec les hommes.

Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?