Quotes About Identity

At sixteen, she was already over drinking, over "being bad.

And you look like you're going to a bar mitzvah at the Ponderosa.

A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?

How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?

Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way?

The future when everybody changes and turns into someone different. I'll become a person I won't like at all. It won't matter because that person will have forgotten all about me. I won't exist anymore. It's worse than dying- It means my life now is not really happening.

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.

It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

The rest of us lined up for debugging and muumuus.

the point of the film....was about being a woman, about caring an not caring what happens to you. it was about not really caring. p.198

That's just one group. The most visible one. There are so many groups at this point. Many of them come together only after an action, to give those who committed the action a name, and then they disband, disappear. You can't know who is part of what. They don't know, either. They might not know they are in a group until the action is done and the group claims it.

I don't know if it's revolutionary not to work," she had told me, "but it's better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You're yourself and you get paid for it," or so she had thought at the time,

It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.

bigotry: leftover component from the days of tribalism, when there were just two groups of people, us and them.

Instead of imposing narrow and arbitrary definitions of Blackness on one another and alienating those who do not measure up, create spaces that allow people to be Black in their own way so they can contribute to our collective advancement.

Don't try to be someone you're not at the beginning of a relationship. Know who you are, accept and love yourself unconditionally -

I'm not just a Strong Black Woman; I'm a Real Human Being with strengths and vulnerabilities, hopes and fears, standards and contradictions.

The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.

Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to 'fix' ourselves to know who we genuinely are.