Quotes About Identity

There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results.

Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she wrote, "The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds...the landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire...

What's the matter with manhood? There's something about how masculinity is imagined, about what's praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.

Gay men have redefined and occasionally undermined conventional masculinity—publicly, for many decades—and often been great allies for women.

Such tasks are always the obstacles to becoming, to being set free, or finding love. Carrying out the tasks undoes the curse. Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, displaced in an animal's body or another's identity. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.

Told from the man's point of view, Vertigo is awash with romantic fog, but from the woman's perspective, it's about being forced to disappear— not from the top of a tower, but in everyday life as two successive lovers make her into someone else for their own ends, a common enough tragedy.

The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don't need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother's name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

Would you ask a man that?") Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

Every time I thought that I was put together, I realized that we're always putting ourselves together, gathering the world in, letting it sift down and form us.

I was stupefied. Had she once been a star and her bright burning had dimmed? Maybe because she had us? Or had Mama

when we done went and ripped all the gold HIS monograms off the anniversary towels and writ SHITHEAD on them with magic markers.

want to be grown-up and drive my own convertible and live in a different town where nobody knows Mama or Daddy.

Sidda looked like she could not have been born from my body. This was the first time I ever felt that she was not me: that she was someone else. I didn't like that feeling.

She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.