Quotes About Identity

Coming out was so difficult until millions of other men and women came out. Then it got a lot easier

Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.

PRIVACY IS THEFT

How old are you?" the woman asked. "You look about eleven." "Twenty-four," Mae said. "My god. You don't have a mark on you. Were we ever twenty-four, my love?" She turned to the man, who was using a ballpoint pen to scratch the arch of his foot. He shrugged, and the woman let the matter drop.

This could be the cause of all modern neurosis . . . [;] the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change.

You don't know what it's like to be a man over thirty who's never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.

But you already know me pretty well by now! Helena said, and then directed her to her own profile page.

I live because I do not exist.

Late that night, I get back to Grant and Eric's, and they are watching a movie where Al Pacino is blind. Al Pacino is angry and talks with an unplaceable accent. He is maybe Canadian.

They clearly see through the whole thing, that we are using this to get exposure, to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once is has been entered into the record.

That's what books do. They are the building blocks, the DNA, if you will, of you. Think of everything you have ever read, everything you have ever learned from holding a book in your hands and how that knowledge shaped you and made you who you are today. Looking back now on all those years, to when I first discovered books at the library, I see that I was simply falling in love. Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.

I thought we were all the same but as I was inside my dead body and looking into the murky river bottom I knew that some are wanting to run and some are afraid to run and maybe they are broken and are angry for it.

Growing up I thought all countries look, were required to look, completely different?Congo was all jungle, robust and wet and green, Germany was all black forests, Russia was white, all of it Siberian. But every country now seemed to offer a little of every other country, and every given landscape, I finally realized, existed somewhere in the U.S.

The elevator reads your ID, and then says hello.

If it's like us, why is it somewhere else? Deng asked. Dut

One button for the rest of your life online.

What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone's library is like peeking into their DNA.

I know that at your age you can feel powerless, and that powerlessness can make you angry.

Am I just curious? Or do I want this? And if I did want this, what sort of person am I?

It was no longer exotic to have a gay presidential candidate. In fact, since the advent of the Indiana mayor—never president but now a senator—no presidential election had been without one. Though, to be sure, every gay candidate had been in a certain mold—

The effect of his appearance on the world was profound. He walked through the city not as a poor Tenderloin kid, his baggy clothes shrouding him with negative assumptions, but as Rupert, the preppy cartoon bear, who was welcome anywhere. He became someone the adults he encountered—at his high school, at the mosque, at any store he entered—trusted and wanted around.

It is as though they simply cannot contemplate the notion of a short, slight man who dresses and moves like a popular (mis)conception of a homosexual being attractive to millions of women.

I knelt down, trying to put the many pieces of the letter back together again. It was impossible. I dumped the pieces of the letter in the trash, wishing my life would end. I truly believed, at that moment, that death would be better than my prospects for any kind of happiness. I was nothing but an "It.