Quotes About Identity

No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me. I was just attempting to fill in a too-long intermission in my life with a trivial "masked play.

I wonder whether the nation itself is not an enormous mask intolerant of the rivalry of individual masks.

If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destined to be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning.

le visage est le pont jeté entre le moi et celui des autres

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it's enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

If the convention of the face were empty, perhaps a disguise too was just as empty.

Being a clown would be all right, but I did not want to be a clown unaware that he was one.

you yourself were split into several parts. Just as I had a double existence, you did too. If I was another person wearing a stranger's mask, you were another person wearing the mask of yourself. Another wearing the mask of himself … a gruesome combination.…

I was a cuckold present at his wife's adultery. This was a triangular relationship with one actor playing two parts. If one were to make a drawing of "me," "the mask, that is, the other me," and "you," it would be a non-Euclidean triangular relationship, existing on a single straight line.

thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more than on yours.

When man evolved from the monkey, he did not do so by his use of tools, as is usually claimed, but because he had come to distinguish himself from monkeys by his face.

Even though I might tear the mask off of your hypocrisy, you had a thousand layers of masks, and one after another a new one would appear; but my mask was only a single ply, and under that there remained not even a layer of ordinary face.

To the left of the rubber boots in the front lie the corpse of the mask and the button. I leave it all up to you. I shall have returned home a step ahead of you. I pray with all my heart that you will come back with your usual expression, as if nothing has happened.…

my real face, which was merely an incomplete copy of the mask...

If we had been far apart even before the accident, what was I trying to recapture at this late date with all the fuss about the mask? Nothing was worth the trouble of getting back. There wasn't a single thing to hide from the eight uneventful years we had spent together; since I was enclosed by a wall of nonexpression thicker than my bandages, I had lost all right to complain.

No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world, full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man's worth, pays his wages, and guarantees him the right to live.

I was dazzled perhaps by the double aspect of the mask—was it the negation of my real face or actually a new face?—and I had been obliged to take an unavoidably circuitous road because I had forgotten the essential point that even this daze was a form of action.

it doesn't follow that all bearded men are bullies or heroes. There's the fortuneteller's beard, the Lenin cut, or again the European aristocrat's. And then there's the Castro beard and what is apparently the latest style—the beards sported by youngsters posing as artists, but just what that is called I don't know.

Yet, it was not I who should feel ashamed. If there was anyone who should suffer, was it not rather the world that had buried me alive, that made no attempt to recognize a man's personality without the passport of the face?

imagining the scene when I would confront you who were the symbol of "the others.

Perhaps I had stumbled unexpectedly on the terrible truth that anyone closing the window of the soul with a mask of flesh was merely shutting away scar webs inside. Having lost my face, perhaps I could make contact with another world of real things, which were not pictures painted in windows.

I was afraid of my own shadow as long as I imagined others to be looking at me, but when I was actually looked at, I seemed to become aware of my real character. Perhaps in my imagination the mask was something that exposed me, but in actuality it was an opaque means of concealment.

when I returned to my room, took off the mask, washed away the adhesive material, and again looked at my real face, the merciless scar webs seemed less real. The mask had already become just as real as the webs, and if the mask was a temporary form, so were the webs. Apparently the mask was safely beginning to take root on my face.

But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand doesn't it?