Quotes About Identity

The Self says 'I AM'–as in the very grand sayings of Christ, especially in the Gospel of John, in which he says in the state of onenenss with Yahweh (which in Hebrew means 'I AM'), I AM is the way and the truth and the life–but the ego says 'I am this' or 'I am that,' thus attaching itself only to a small portion of the Vastness. (62)

We are all the products and victims of our own upbringing, until we reflect, refuse, and rebel.

Poor Mary. They married her to Jesus, and Jesus is an asexual circumcised revolutionary. What future is there to be had in that scenario?

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I'd rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini's water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity.

I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser. Well, let's talk Algeria then. Let's talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.

We only kill each other to see ourselves as heroes in our fathers' stories.

Richmond was my birthplace, but it was merely my launching pad, no home.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

Girls will be boys and boys will be girlsIt's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola.

You make to die You are the dead You the assassin of yourself

The first is that all effort to negate self only succeeds in affirming it. The second is that self is not a thing but a reference position.

Tal y como dice el neurocientífico del MIT Sebastian Seung, "la identidad no depende de nuestros genes, sino de las conexiones entre nuestras células cerebrales" (

About then I remembered I was a hungover Jew who was now on drugs at a mosque in a place where the only law was Islam.

En la piscina había dos niñas iguales con bañadores iguales, amarillos. Cuando una se tiraba al agua la otra salía fuera, de forma que siempre estaba la misma niña dentro y fuera del agua al mismo tiempo.

Y tú de qué lado estás? —Del mismo que he estado siempre: del nuestro. —¿Y ése qué lado es? —El de los que van a salir de aquí.

De los libros que ella me dio a leer mientras trataba de instruirme saqué la conclusión de que no hay cosas muy distintas en ningún lugar del mundo y que por eso la gente se viste de colores diferentes y canta canciones distintas para soñar por un segundo que algo distintos son.

No es fácil que confíes en ti mismo cuando todos confían en que seas alguna otra cosa distinta.

Se llamaba Mónica y era morena. Y tenía su vida, su novio, todas esas cosas que tiene la gente. Y no era, y esto Sebastián querría dejarlo muy claro, una musa ni una maga, ni una bruja ni un recuerdo, ni nada de esas cosas con las que la literatura suprime a menudo a las mujeres.

calling a subdivision a "community," for that is precisely what it is not.

Americans in the 1770s were sharply divided according to religion, national origin, location, and even language. Scots Irish Presbyterians in North Carolina, English American Anglicans in Virginia, Dutch and German Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Scottish Highlander Catholics in New York, native-born Congregationalists in Massachusetts—each group had its own culture, its own beliefs, its own set of interests.

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

If God has drawn you to himself, then he has put you 'in Christ Jesus'.