Quotes About Identity

If they were to go away from their land, they must have people round them who had known it, and so could testify to their identity.

My dress is of plain forest green wool, but the other girls are wearing beautiful tunics the color of gems- ruby dresses with sapphire mantles and dappled with jewels that dance before me like little insects on fire. My hair is dark as a crow, but theirs is red and gold and even longer than mine. A ray of sun slashes through the turbulent Irish sky, and I see that my friends' perfect skin shimmers in the sun, making them almost translucent.

I suppose that Lucy and I were worthy of the male gaze, what with her pale blond beauty shown off nicely in a peach summer frock, in contrast to my black hair set against light skin. Tonight I wore my favorite dress of pale green linen, which everyone said complemented my eyes, and a cotton bolero jacket perfect for a summer evening.

it's sad day when you forget your purpose in life.

You can get lost, pretending to be someone you're not.

Aye,Ware is your grandfather, though a more worthless arse I couldn't name.

Just because I'm tall doesn't mean I can play basketball, or even that I want to.

Where you fro, miss?

I can't be my own mother

And I know now that all the time I was trying to get out of the dust, the fact is, what I am, I am because of the dust.

A normal human being… does not exist.

Over the years I've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.

It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.

Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back.

Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.

in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees

My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

I DIDN'T KNOW what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them. Freak or fake, I'd been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both.

Have you ever noticed," Rosalie asks, "that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?

Over the years I've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.