Quotes About Identity

I've always thought you are what you are and you shouldn't pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you're pretending to be.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come.

An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.

Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Britain: the land of embarrassment and breakfast.

Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.

But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. —

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words "heading," "stagnating" and "peaceable." I'd never thought of myself as peaceable—or its opposite—until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen's smiling profile on it.

In other words, in order to believe in what we think our nation stands for, we must constantly, every day, in small acts or thoughts and large, deceive ourselves