Quotes About Identity

That was what gospel was meant to do—make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified. It worked on me. It absolutely worked on me.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience

Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.

I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.

my tribe: raped children, working-class girls, and those raised to both love and hate their own as I had been.

I say, "Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you've never had, the story you've always been afraid to tell.

Marthe said suddenly, 'How many souls on this earth call you Francis? Three? Or perhaps four?' For a moment he looked at her unsmiling; and for a moment she wished, angrily that she could recall the question. Then quite suddenly he smiled, and held out his hand. 'Five,' he said. 'Surely? Since last night.

I don't change from minute to minute. I don't change at all.

Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,' Lymond had said. 'I love you all, but I shall never marry you.

You are a mathematician,' John Dee said. 'I am a musician,' said Lymond.

There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.

All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.

At least this is a nation, with a religion, a head, a status, a policy. Not a damned Noah's ark: a chicken here, a lamb there, a family of wolves in the next field. I suppose you are proud of your French Queen, playing dice with Scots knucklebones for the greater glory of her native land?

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you. On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what?

It was of no importance. Birth did not matter; heredity was merely a hurdle; one was what one made of oneself; that and no other.

Then she said, Thorfinn! quickly, and moved to him; but had hardly got to his side before he loosed his fingers and thumbs and plunged them down to the mattress like spear-points. No!Macbeth. Macbeth. Macbeth! the name reached her like sling-shot. Groa said, They are the same man. I should know. I married both.

What is your principal characteristic, would you say?' 'Treacherousness,' said Danny, gloriously. 'That,' said Lymond pleasantly, 'is everyone's principal characteristic.

Why do you call him M. d'Harcourt? You called Jerott Jerott.' 'I called Jerott a great deal worse than that.

We?' said Chancellor. 'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.

We're all runts and bastards of one sort or another.

You rode sixty miles through the night for a brother who doesn't exist. I haven't been here for four years. I have been growing and changing, somewhere else, with different people, speaking a different language. The old ties are gone: my family wouldn't recognize me: what in God's name do you think I could find to say to them?

There was no place for him there or in Scotland, compared to the one he held in Russia. And although Diccon Chancellor once had thought, wistfully, of a land where likeminded friends might meet and might talk and might make new and astounding discoveries, free of fear, he knew that it was not to be found yet in England.

Your right to die? They accept that already. It is I," said Sybilla, "who do not.