Quotes About Identity

My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you've coaxed it out of her, it's hard not to always believe it.

Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life.

I think about how you get trained early on as woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

I tell them one of our dishwashers is from Guayaquil, and they want to meet him. I get Alejandro, and he ends up sitting and smoking with them, talking about politics and grinning madly, and I get a glimpse of who he is when he isn't engulfed in spray and steam and food waste.

You get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is "natural.

I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.

He'd always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he'd never been anything but this one self.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

When I was growing up I always wanted to be someone. Now I realize I should have been more specific.

After all, in private, we're all misfits

Growing up in Michigan was fine...until I realized where I was.

All my life I always wanted to be someone. I see now I should have been more specific.

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.

Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man

It seems this time being a grass widow has been good for you; this temporary emancipation from my domination is allowing you to develop your own identity.

Singing is a little bit like the Halloween of emotions. It allows us to put on any costume we want; to become any character we need to express at any given moment; to instantly feel better and to do so in a way that is generally more publicly acceptable.

We can't fabricate our being, we can only receive it.

Who are we? That is the first question. It is a question almost impossible to answer. But we all agree that the busy self occupied in our daily activities is not quite the real self. We are quite sure we have lost something in the mere pursuit of living.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as child? Variant: What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

Sometimes the discovery of something we can classify as our voice coincides with a weariness with that voice, and the struggle begins to create a new voice.

Throughout history, parents have tried to name their offspring in a manner that would foretell the trajectory of their future. It's one of the first spells humans encounter in this life. Little did your parents know what would happen today, for you, because of your name, but they blessed this day for you.