Quotes About Identity

When a man's value is no longer measured by what he does, by his finances or social standing, how does he determine his worth? In our world, a man's presence--his depth of awareness--is his most valuable asset.

Young lady, Silk said urbanely, I think you'd be amazed at how little Polgara's concerned about who you are. Polgara? Ce'Nedra faltered. The Polgara? I thought you said that she was your sister. I lied, Silk confessed. It's a vice a have.

What I'm trying to say, Garion,' Durnik continued seriously, 'is that you can't go through life being afraid of what you are. If you do that, sooner or later somebody will come along who'll misunderstand, and you'll have to do something to show him that it's not him that you're afraid of.

see the Nimble Thief and the Man with Two Lives and the Blind Man, but I don't see the others. Where's the Dreadful Bear and the Knight Protector? The Horse Lord and the Bowman? And the ladies? Where are they—the Queen of the World and the Mother of the Race That Died?

I see the Nimble Thief and the Man with Two Lives and the Blind Man, but I don't see the others. Where's the Dreadful Bear and the Knight Protector? The Horse Lord and the Bowman? And the ladies? Where are they—the Queen of the World and the Mother of the Race That Died?

It's always best in the long run to be what you are. It isn't proper to behave as if you were more, but it isn't good to behave as if you were less, either. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?

won't be them; it will be me.

We all become lost children at one time or another.When no one else can find us, we must find ourselves.

I was a normal guy who got sent to Iraq and became crazy, so they sent me back to America to become sane, and now it's America that's driving me crazy.

It's a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?

My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he expresses himself have been thrown into big time flux.