Quotes About Identity

So yo then man what's your story?

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. 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.

Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

As each person's sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected.

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

T]he worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one. It is easier than you think.

The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.

In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

I'll gladly identify myself if you'll first simply explain what it is I'm identifying myself as. This is my position. You're requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The term for this is "duress."

Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way

Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?

I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

Somos lo que caminamos entre dos puntos.

I didn't stand for anything. If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Que todas as pessoas são iguais na sua secreta e silenciosa crença de que no fundo são diferentes de todas as outras.

The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God.