Quotes About Identity

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

No one reveals himself more completely to others than to himself - that is, if he reveals himself at all.

He didn't want the friends of the different stages of his life to meet. Their encounter would almost be between different facets of himself, face to face.

ever there is doubt as to the advisability of advancing a human identity to the mansion worlds, the universe governments invariably rule in the personal interests of that individual; they unhesitatingly advance such a soul to the status of a transitional being, while they continue their observations of the emerging morontia intent and spiritual purpose. Thus divine justice is certain of achievement, and divine mercy is accorded further opportunity for extending its ministry.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.

There is often a great difference between what we want and what we think we want, and this is complicated still further by the fact that we are often greatly influenced by what others want for us

Molezelda vaguely. "They always do what their mother tells them. Who are you?" "Nobody in particular," said Wilbur. "Just a prince. Ignore me.

She didn't look any older, so far as she could tell from the mirror, but her heart felt like somebody had been scraping the last bits out with a spoon.

Broad views about life have shrunk into religions, and we have been turned into their symbols. They regard us as empty symbols. Symbols of a religion, a nation. We mustn't be trapped by that. In this war, let that be the ground of your contest. A ground that cannot be reduced to definition and detail.

I can never really enjoy being famous.

Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren't married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled. At her office she is loud and filled with infectious laugher. Here she is more quiet and deferential. I can cut a cucumber, I say more sharply than I intend. She winces and busies herself with searching for a vegetable peeler, if only to make a point.

See over there, I can be me, he says. I smile but it makes me sad. I haven't found any safe spaces. Damien says, you're safe with me. Until I'm not. He raises an eyebrow. With you I mean, I add. I dream about an internship on the West Coast, but there is nothing for me to do. I am not the president's daughter. I've never met a movie star. I barely watch television.

He is patriotic but not sentimental so Mom and I think the placement is ironic but it stays because Dad sometimes feels like a minority in his own home.

Strika is pulling down his short and showing that he is man to this woman while I am holding her one leg and another soldier is holding the other. She is screaming, DEVIL BLESS YOU! DEVIL BORN YOU! But it is not Devil that is borning me. I am having father and mother and I am coming from them.

This is supposed to be my season to carve my own space if I play my cards right[...] Do I want it? I want so many things, so many competing things. I want to run to win, to run away from myself, to run away from home.

Other days when he has come from or doesn't want to go to a shift at work, he is wild, sucking away everything I thought I knew about the way I'm supposed to be in this world. I feel like a star caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole, unraveling, spinning under the control of some unseen force, torn into streams of fire forever spiraling, never to be put together again.

I've always felt weird about coming to Nigeria. Everything is always so overwhelming and aggressive from the moment we step out of the airport and into a country that my father loves so deeply he had to run away from it. But I've never had a choice. No one has ever asked me. Each summer, my father's momentum dragged us all home.

I am always someone's accessory, someone's afterthought, the supporting actress in another person's drama and that thought fills me with fire.

My father and I look up and then at each other. I can feel my heart separate from the rest of my body. I want to hand it to frothing old man in front of me and say, take it. It's yours, because it has always been yours, if not for your sperm, your food, and the school fees that you pay on my behalf, then who and where would I be? Nothing. I am because you are. I say nothing. Each word I search for flies from my brain before I can send it off my tongue.

I'm still me, I want to say to him, your son, but that would hardly help if I am currently everything wrong with the world.

Je suis toutes ces choses. Toutes ces choses, mais j'ai déjà eu une mère, et elle m'aimait.

I have found more fist bumps and handshakes and high fives until someone shouts, wassup my nigga, because drunk white kids think imitating black people is hilarious.