Quotes About Identity

nodded. I did know. Once I'd started searching out clothes that fit and looked good on the body I had instead of the one that I wanted, I had discovered exactly the feeling Leela Thakoon was talking about.

So, Nora leaves him in the end, she said, as they walked down the stairs. What? In the play. A Doll's House . That's right. Beatrice went to the sink. She says she can't be anyone's wife or anyone's mother until she knows who she is. She walks out of their house and closes the door behind. It's this iconic moment. At least, that's what our teacher said. That's very interesting.

Jennifer Weiner

without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet's surface. Then they rake the grass and carry the garden furniture from the terrace to beneath the roof of the shed, they deflate the rubber dinghy that Richard hasn't tried out a

With all the holes in you already there's no reason to define the outside environment as alien.

Of what are you thinking now? she asked. I am thinking of myself. That's just what I am doing. Are you also thinking of yourself? No, of yourself—of you, Mogens.

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3).

I therefore have to use The Force. And weirdly, this doesn't work very well. I don't understand why, because on the last census, I put my religion down as Jedi Knight...

Memory was a story you told yourself about yourself, extrapolated from a tiny dot-matrix of facts.

We learned that we are the stories we tell ourselves, and so we have to tell those stories with great care. Because whatever stories we tell ourselves, are true.

instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.

in fact, as a woman, I have no country

If you are Pakistani or Indian you might just as well commit suicide when the team is humiliated; if you're West Indian, you might feel the world has fallen apart when things go wrong at the Oval. But these are countries where cricket is one of the leading suppliers of national pride. In England, you don't support cricket teams, you follow them. It's the game you support, not the team.

But to most of the English, their history is just that, history. The contrast is with Scotland or Ireland, where every self-respecting adult considers themselves to belong to an unbroken tradition stretching back to the wearing of woad: oppressed peoples remember their history.

The moment a Frenchman opens his mouth, he declares his identity. The French speak French. The English speak a language which belongs to no one.

Aura, he whispered, I wish I could wipe away just one of your tears. Then I'd feel like a person again. Like I'm something more than a bunch of light.

Where's your kilt? How about this, he said in a low voice. You don't ask me about haggis and bagpipes, and I won't ask you about garlic and Goodfellas.

I can't forget you, any more than I can forget my own name. He kissed me then, and the world which no longer mattered, completely fell away.

Others Act Upon Me, Therefore I Am

When the accoutrements of custom disappear, they may be replaced by a sense of abandonment, of being adrift in unchartered waters. Our children lack a sense of history and belonging—of an anchored presence in the world. To establish a sense of control and comforting familiarity in an alienating society, the individual may resort to a wide range of pathological behavior—substance addiction, eating disorders, criminal behaviors, and so on.

The borderline individual does not accept her own intelligence, attractiveness, or sensitivity as constant traits, but rather as comparative qualities to be continually re-earned

Central to the borderline syndrome is the lack of a core sense of identity. When describing themselves, borderlines typically paint a confused or contradictory self-portrait, in contrast to other patients who generally have a much clearer sense of who they are.

New York Times writer Louis Sass put it this way: Each culture probably needs its own scapegoats as expressions of society's ills. Just as the hysterics of Freud's day exemplified the sexual repression of that era, the borderline, whose identity is split into many pieces, represents the fracturing of stable units in our society.2 Though

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.