Quotes About Identity

When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren't Einstein. You weren't anything. That's a bad moment.

The Gong Show provided me with five years of the happiest times of my life, but that's that. And to be known as the guy who gave the world The Gong Show -- listen, my Uncle George isn't known as anything. So I guess it isn't so bad in that context.

I am no Baylor," Quinlan retorted. "And I never will be." "You're not supposed to be," Taras replied angrily. "You're supposed to be Quinlan.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

A lot of times black folks look for love in all the wrong places. You're always looking for somebody to love you, be accepted, and there's the insecurities that are even transmitted through rap. Everyone is trying to aim to please too much.

Costumes. The clothes we wear over who we really are. Or really want to be

Nothing can unman you like an un-man.

These were kids for whom simple self-destruction wasn't enough.

Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know.

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.

The real issues aren't the quarks that hold together our physical bodies. The real issue is our own personal nonlinearity - the real us. We can't see our real selves; we only see the containers we happen to be in right now. The real "us" is software, not hardware, which means it's without mass, which means it has no time. We are eternal - saved or not. That's the problem, because we each have an eternity ahead of us. Where will we spend it?

Attacking the ostensible paradox of altering previously recorded historical events, Robert Heinlein's short story All You Zombies remains the ultimate, absurdly extreme, example for most devotees of this genre.1 Traversing the

The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.

You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.