Quotes About Identity

Who we were and what we did and what was done to us - we don't get to shrug that off and become some new shiny person.

Everyone knows that trekkers and whatever starwarsians call themselves aren't supposed to have anything to do with one another.

Jude, Cardan thought, hating even the shape of her name. Jude.

Human girls cry when they're sad and laugh when they're happy. They have a single fixed shape rather than shifting with their whims like windblown smoke. They have their own parents, whom they love. They don't go around stealing other girls' mothers. At least that's what Kaye thought human girls were like. She wouldn't really know. After all, she wasn't human.

She reminded herself that there was nothing they could do to her. She was already like them. Already dead.

She turns to me. 'I thought we were nothing alike, you and I. But it turns out we're just the same.' I don't think she believes that to be a good thing.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.

Maybe it was the shame that was the problem.

From a young age, he had to learn to survive, and to shape-shift into whatever pleased the people he was around.

I couldn't be the child that they had loved. Not after everything that happened to me. Not after learning that I am made of sticks and snow.

By you, I am forever undone.

What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong? Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.

Father, I am what you made me. I've become your daughter after all.

Memories were your most intimate legacy. But if those memories were compromised in some way, would your continued existence be compromised, too?

The only place you will be accepted is the place you make for yourself.

Race doesn't exist. Skin color exists. Hair and eye color are real. Body type varies from individual to individual, as does tooth shape and color, the form of fingernails, and the amount and texture of body hair. But 'race' is a phantom conjured up by people no different from each other than purebred Cocker spaniels are. Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.

It was so beautiful to know that I would go on forever, and so terrible to know that the part of me that fought through the pain of existence as Cadence Drake would never be only Cadence Drake beyond the few brief, flickering instants that my fragile fleshself survived. I would be absorbed into the greater whole and would cease to exist.

Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

nobody escapes this sick feeling that comes with discovering, over and over again, that the people you love are not who you thought they were.

She supposed it was a universal truth that mothers, after tearing out their hair and tacking their raw beating hearts to the outsides of their clothing for anyone to see, were given no warning that some-day their baby-holding days would be over.

He told me I could live in a corner of the world, like I was doing now, and think I was happy, or I could live in the whole world and know where I belonged," Peter said.

My name is Nobody.

it is precisely in these banalities that the unhomely stirs, as the violence of a racialized society falls most enduringly on the details of life: where you can sit, or not; how you can live, or not; what you can learn, or not; who you can love, or not.