Quotes About Identity

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].

It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn't changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

Jason said, Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe. What does the 'T' stand for? 'The.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are? -Richard

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

I think there is a Paris inside us all.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.

Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends.

and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.

How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"—also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories.

It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've *become* all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what you really *are*. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

Personne n'est émotionnellement vide.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money.

What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.