Quotes About Identity

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you're willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from--anything at all can follow anything at all.

I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

Men are a strange breed.

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.

Would you think he was anybody like you?

Towns aren't even towns anymore," Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. "Dallas wasn't ever one, when you get right down to it. It's just a suburb looking for a place to light.

I don't know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone's life to be the expert.

And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. (Sweethearts, 1986)

Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense

My name's not José, goddamn it." I cast a wintry eye at Lynette's spurious beigey Jesus nailed to the siding. He makes life a perfect misery for as many as he can, then never takes the heat. He should try resurrection in today's complex world. He'd fall right off His cross on His ass. He couldn't sell newspapers.

Rien n'est jamais clair car nous disposons tous d'un éventail de moi parmi lesquels choisir.

Though I thought if you grew up in a place with such a strange name—including Saskatchewan (a name I'd rarely heard before)—then you'd always feel strange about yourself.

heteronormativity.

White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.

No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it's probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.

Whatever race might be, it is certainly not logical or scientific.

the product of a freed people that have not the spirit to be free.… We

Symbols become sacred to people because they represent loyalties deeper than words can express. That's why they hate to see their symbols violated.

A life purpose is what I'm meant to do and be while I'm here on the earth.