Quotes About Identity

While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors."

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

My father's a heart surgeon but you don't see me going around cutting up people's hearts!" Christopher retorted. He scratched his head. "Though actually that might be kind of fun!

One of the most fundamental of human fears is that our existence will go unnoticed.

I put on several different outfits. The advantage of not knowing who you are is you can attempt to be all things to all men … or women. My mother saw me always glancing in every mirror, every window; in the gleaming blades of knives. She said, "Jill is vain." She did not know I was looking to see who would be there this time.

People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.

Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.

Our history deserves honesty and our citizens need it. Without understanding who we really were, we'll never quite grasp who we have become, leaving us prey to demagogues and despicable entertainments.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle