Quotes About Identity

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species.

It is in the nature of things that the man should be identified with the company in which history finds him.

She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.

There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.

It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

I was actually a bit disappointed about the amount of sex in the show. I think Backus should get out a bit more, get a relationship, perhaps make her a lesbian.

Ojiisan says if you want to understand a people, look at their language. The words write the history, not the other way around.

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly, And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking. Which was the real - the butterfly or the man ? Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things? The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea Returns in time to the shallows of a transparent stream. The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city, Was once the Prince of the East Hill. So must rank and riches vanish. You know it, still you toil and toil - what for?

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.

Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.

I had done some flimflam movies, but I didn't understand what being an actor meant anymore.

I am what I am and what I have always been, a poor soul on a journey.

It was great fun to think of myself as a doll I could bring to life.

Every day I think, 'Gosh, you look a bit tired today,' and it's just recently occurred to me that it's not that I'm tired, it's that this is the way I look now.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.

And even though I adore the fact that Francesca has Ben's eyes, I also see now that her biological connection to us is irrelevant. She is her own little person. She is Francesca. If we weren't her "natural" parents, we would still have loved her just as much.

No one warned you that having children reduced you right down to some smaller, rudimentary, primitive version of yourself, where your talents and your education and your achievements meant nothing. Clementine