Quotes About Identity

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t 's and b 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x .

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.

She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, Are you Christian? Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.

In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)

Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.

This is my country,' Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.

The matter with us is you.

It was like that Talking Head song. "And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' … And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife' ". As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.