Quotes About Identity

Que ella que con su muerte le dice a nuestro César: Me conquisté yo misma.

Princes and Counties! Surely, a princely testimony, a goodly Count Comfect; a sweet gallant, surely! O! that I were a man for his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules, that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.

He hath always but slightly, known himself...King Lear

Stay, I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me. Viola: That you do think you are not what you are. Olivia: If I think so, I think the same of you. Viola: Then think you right; I am not what I am. Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be. Viola: Would it be better, madam, than I am? I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

Love loving not itself, none other can.

Think you I am no stronger than my own sex being so father'd and husbanded?

Slabosti tvoje ime je žena.

Mad I call it, for to define true madness, what is't to be nothing else but mad?

My mistress is my mistress, this myself.

I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.

Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary.

No, I wasn't trying to make Nat Turner look stupid. I was trying to make him more human. More like me. Angry, impotent, confused about his own sexuality. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. Is that microphone really on?

To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.

Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.

But oh, my brothers, black folk ain't never goin' to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain't goin' to be free, they ain't goin' to have no spoonbread an' sweet cider less'n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.

Both of us put up a brave front about it all, but a love affair, like some prodigy of plastic surgery, is flesh laid on to living flesh and to break it up is to tear off great hunks and parts of yourself.

Studdy was thinking that the creature was an animal; he was saying to himself that it was surely in error that she had become a member of the human race.

Mr Apse was sixty-three now and Miss Bell was forty-five. Mrs Pope was fifty-nine, Tindall forty-three. Plunkett, reckoned in the village to be about fifty, was in fact precisely that.

Morrissey was singularly small, a man in his mid-thirties who had once been compared to a ferret. He had a thin trap of a mouth and greased black hair that he perpetually attended, directing it back from his forehead with a clogged comb. He was dressed now, as invariably he was, in flannel trousers and the jacket of a blue striped suit over a blue pullover, and a shirt that was buttoned to the neck but did not have a tie in its collar.

I turned away from a bearded face. I put Elsie Timson's holy book down a lavatory. At St Monica's School for Girls I sat in innocence, drinking cocoa with Miss Tample until Miss Tample became a monster. My father ran away, my mother was disgraceful. God is in this kitchen,' cried Mrs Eckdorf. 'God is revealing Himself through that sleeping woman.

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Well, some folks figger as how I'm long dead, even whilst they're talkin' to my face.