Quotes About Identity

Julian Thompson

Our stories are what we are. Our stories preserve us. We give them to one another. Our stories have value

How do you know me? she says. He looks at her through his narrow eyes. I was, he says. You were what? she asks. I was, he says again. And now I'm not.

People never outgrow wanting to be liked for being who they truly are, especially when they've grown up in the limelight or its shadowy edge.

When boys grow into men, their boyishness is still apparent each time they abandon themselves a little. I stretch against them sometimes--lovesickness, it is the same ache as homesickness for me--and I marvel. The length of their bodies, it's where I find my house, my old street, Ashbury Park and all of its yowling--men, they walk around carrying my country, my motherland, and they don't even know. They don't have the tiniest idea.

It's not the first time in his life he's felt like a man.

My memories will be erased and then I'll be force-fed the story from the society pages?

Maybe Helmund is an angel after all. Maybe that's who he's been all along.

I am who I am at any given moment…. That's the only way you can know me.

Olmak istedi?imiz ki?i olamay?z her zaman.

And when I say my type, I mean the type I liked to destroy!

I know that I am—all that I am. And all that I am is full and ripe. All that I am is standing still, waiting and watching and bursting with life. Holding the straining seams of my skin, my passion and wit and my sanity in. Waiting for someone to soothe and to say "I understand. You're home.

I've come to realize that home is a feeling as much as it is a place; it is as much about loving what I do as being where I am.

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

Before him and since he'd gone away, she'd either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else. She was only ever wholly herself with him.

Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O.McCaucus-Bigg A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn't Kinkade's name. O.McCaucus-Bigg? Braggart, are you? Kinkade would roar. Not as big as mine,laddie! A good joke, suitable for thirteen-year-old boys and bored sergeants and subalterns.

but the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accomodated it. He had loved abd he had lost and it had made him who he was.

One only ever saw a fraction of someone, whatever it was they chose to show you, and extrapolated a whole person from that. And saw them through a prism of one's own prejudices.

Yes, Miss Masters, but walking is also a way to announce who you are. Gideon waved one arm impassionedly. How you view yourself in the world. The way you hold yourself, the way you move, how you occupy a space, tells other people a good deal about you, ~from To Love a Thief

Once I have the target in my sights, he said, close to her ear, I think of what I love most in the world. What will happen if I miss? Will they be harmed? Will they go hungry? Will I see them again? He paused at length. Because I've learned that once you know what truly matters in life, and once you know who and what you truly love, then you know who you are...and your aim will always be true.

Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps variations of the same thing, like verb tenses.

Czechoslovakian

Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl.

the man of my dreams is a girl.