Quotes About Identity

She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me.

Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?

Madeline began hearing people saying Derrida. She heard them saying Lyotard and Foucault and Deleuze and Baudrillard. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

Nous savions que les filles étaient nos jumelles, que nous existions tous dans l'espace comme des animaux qui avaient la même peau, et qu'elles savaient tout de nous alors que nous étions incapables de percer leur mystère. Nous savions, enfin, que les filles étaient en réalité des femmes déguisées, qu'elles comprenaient l'amour et même la mort, et que notre boulot se bornait à créer le bruit qui semblait tant les fasciner.

I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.

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. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders - you don't see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

Desdemona oli tottunut näkemään heidän siamilaisvarjonsa iltaisin vasten valkeaksi kalkittua talonseinää, ja aina kohdatessaan vain oman varjonsa hänestä tuntui kuin se olisi halkaistu kahtia.

As meninas estavam enormes naqueles vestidos de cerimónia, construídos à volta de uma estrutura de arame. Tinham quilos e quilos de cabelo, bem presos, na cabeça. Embriagadas, beijando-nos, ou a desmaiar nas cadeiras, estavam destinadas ao ensino superior, aos maridos, à educação dos filhos, à infelicidade que dificilmente se percebia - enfim, à vida.

I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure.

That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn't become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn't want to.

One's country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words.

Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was."   You

as she peered distrustfully over the rail of my crib, she saw my face—and blood intervened. Desdemona's worried expression hovered above my (similarly) perplexed one. Her mournful eyes gazed down at my (equally) large black orbs. Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what grandchildren are supposed to do: I erased the years between us. I gave Desdemona back her original skin.

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.

After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.

She'd always been a failed bohemian, anyway.

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy that he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex.