Quotes About Identity

Losing in any game is not gambling, but losing yourself is.

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke and that the joke is oneself.

We are all citizens of history.

YOU YOU YOU your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook crackling and yellow, curling at the edges a book of myths in which i do not appear.

It's so hard being goth. You have to have a bad time everywhere.

No man can walk away from his own story

People even said I was a racist because I shot black bank robbers at the beginning of Dirty Harry. So, first I'm labeled right-wing. Then I'm a racist. Now it's macho or male chauvinism. It's a whole number nowadays to make people feel guilty on different levels. It doesn't bother me because I know where the fuck I am on the planet and I don't give a shit.

You can put a pig in a palace and that doesn't make him a prince! You can put a prince in a pig pen and he wont't become a pig.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself and your dreams.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

We're too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.

Take away the clothes of the greatest living man, his father once told him, and you behold a very embarrassed, naked and defenseless animal.

A powerful sense of national pride built on a belief in historical humiliation, combined with an inability to distinguish between the nation and its government, goes a long way towards explaining why many in the Chinese diaspora, including Chinese-Australian citizens, remain loyal to the PRC and defend its actions even when they conflict with Australia's values and interests.

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

Stefan George: "He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man.

The sound of the sea you hear in Proust, as if the whole book were a shell held to your ear, is the sound of the amniotic fluid, reminding you, across all your barriers of self-protection, that the first thing you ever heard was voices in the water.

It is the destiny of the emigrant that the foreign land does not become his homeland: his homeland becomes foreign.

Nationalism is the culture of the uncultivated, and they are legion. —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, CONTRO VIENTO Y MAREA, P. 439

Pygmalion: "A comedy about a man who turns a girl into a lady, but in doing so overlooks the woman.

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, VARIA, VOL. 1, P. 203

Sartre's existentialism, where it essentially means having the chutzpah to do what it takes so that you may suit yourself—not quite the same thing as being true to yourself.)