Quotes About Identity

Panama is a country that's been dealing with issues of identity since its very birth. It was born on Wall Street. It was born out of engineering construction. It was the canal. Because of the canal, the country was born, so the country has been divided into pro-canal and against-canal people for so long.

If you go to Wall Street, there is someone from Harvard, Stanford, etc, who relate to each other by the batch they studied in, the dorm they lived in, and so on.

I was a kiddie pool attendant, and I was a white rapper. That's not going to get you a job on Wall Street.

I've never personally differentiated a person who dressed up in a three-piece suit and goes to Wall Street from a person who dresses up in a polyester uniform and works at McDonalds. I think it's all drag.

I was born in Puerto Rico - I used to sit in the sun until I looked like a piece of bacon. It's a wonder now that I don't look like an old wallet. I'm a very fortunate person.

My brothers used to call me Bob. They'd laugh at me, and I didn't get it. I'm 13 years old at the time, and then one day my brother's friend says, 'You know what Bob stands for? 'Booty on back.' You're fat.' Like my butt was so big I could reach for my wallet over my shoulder. And I broke down.

I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.'

When I think of high school, stills are so important: it's all about the wallet with the kids - they define themselves with pictures, who they know, whose pictures they have. Yearbook pictures.

Creating a personal space with individual items that you love is so much easier on the wallet and really expresses your creativity.

In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

Music used to be a more personal thing, and it defined who you were. Now it's like wallpaper.

In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

I'm not pretty. The truth is I didn't think I could be a model at all. I was looking at some of the guys on the walls at Irene Marie and I thought to myself 'Jesus Christ. I can't do this. I don't look anything like these guys'.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.

I never had posters on my walls, and I didn't have any icons, either. I come from a small village in Wirral, and my family didn't watch TV. I wasn't exposed to people with icon status. David Bowie popped up, but I had already shaved my eyebrows off by the time I saw his.

I think because of the eccentricity of my work and how I dress, people expect me to be bouncing off the walls. But that's just not how I am.

I was terrified to be my true self because I felt that it wasn't enough. But I allowed myself to break down those walls.

I was always the misfit jock who was with people painting on walls.

In America, dogs are viewed by their names first, breed second. And dogs live behind walls. It's an unnatural point of view.

There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?

I don't like the idea that in music, clothes, taste or anything, we are limited to a certain style, because we need to maintain an identity, maybe between some subculture group. Hopefully, all those walls break down, and music is just music.

When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

We are not going to build a pressure in Mexico. We're not building walls to retain our people.