Quotes About Identity

What do you do for a living? The first thing everyone always wants to know is what I do when I'm not sleeping, what sorts of exams and theses I have to my name as if they wanted to reserve a place in my curriculum vitae for the date of my death. There ought to be a curriculum vitae whose first line is the date of death.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion.

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone.

In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was from the streets. Which is to stay, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish.

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.

We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship.

If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?

can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more-there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels.

He smiled. "You already are, Piscine—in your heart. Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ.

You already are, Piscine--in your heart. Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ.

She heard "Hairless Christians", and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.

the only Raj they managed to get was a

Until it knows its rank for certain, the animal lives a life of unbearable anarchy.

And she prays with her eyes closed. It's just a crucifix. And if he's an ape, so be it-he's an ape. He's still the Son of God.

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Whenever I travel anywhere, I'm constantly asked if I'm Swedish. It's the burden of most Norwegians. The Swedes have just got a better publicity agent, I think.

Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, believe me - there's nothing I'd rather do! I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.