Quotes About Identity

I am a bundle of other people's histories, a creature of circumstance.

Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

I'd get this, I luuuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I'd just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad 'loves' you and hasn't a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What's he love then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.

So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am.

Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement.

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain.

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.

Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've become attached to the disfigurement of my own life.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.

in art your limitations are also your strengths. What you're not good at, what you can't think of, even the mistakes you make all contribute to your personal style. To have no such constraints is to be shapeless, she said, and to have no voice. This dictum helped explain Kay's growing identity crisis.

Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are.

You had bought us some other family's dream house.

Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart.

Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

Men have always gotten to name children after themselves, while not doing any of the work.

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen.

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.

Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn't?

Ese altruismo compulsivo parecía abnegación, sacrificio, pero era algo más escalofriante. Si Carol ya no tenía ni la más remota idea de lo que podía desear para ella, ¿qué sacrificaba? A Jackson le entristeció observar que, con los años, su mujer había reemplazado de un modo insidioso el placer con la virtud.

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.

One of the things I learned with Charles," said Gray carefully, "was that finding someone like you does not necessarily mean that either of you should be that way.

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.