Quotes About Identity

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute

Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

As a rule, almost all of them are Midwesterners...This area of the country, what are we to say of this area of the country, Ms. Beadsman?...Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity. Corn, a steady waning complex of heavy industry, and sports. What are we to say? We feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn't know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually. What are we to say about it?

I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling.

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

One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for

Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.

Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.

a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself—that

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother's

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

As most adults know, the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence.

Then Poor Tony's body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

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.

So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we're thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn't think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can't think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can't ourselves be the object of our thinking.

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.