Quotes About Identity

When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.

It was as though she had some alter ego who told her she did not belong here. But she had never known anywhere else, and where else could there be?

Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.' 'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly. 'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.

We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.

I control the world so long as I can name it.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.

As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognise their mother's outlook for what it was. They realised with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered – trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved for ever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself.

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

You were... Well, you were who you were.' 'We're all that,' says Claudia. 'It's something one has to overcome.

And in any case, I am someone else now. This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were. What I mean is that old age has different needs, different satisfactions, a different outlook. I remember my young self, and I am not essentially changed, but I perform otherwise today. There are things I no longer want, things I no longer do, things that are now important.

My body has conditioned things, to some extent. The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed.

You think back. And often it seems more real than now. I mean, here I am, like this, but in my mind it's like I was different. Young, you see. You never really believe you're not anymore.

Find something to do,' says Claudia. I can't, shouts Lisa, I can't I can't I can't I don't know where to find it I don't know where to look I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

But you are not sure it is possible to outgrow the things that have built you from nothing into something.

todos nós sabemos com África sabe se transformar naquela que cada um tem dentro de si.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love. Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

L'abîme est ma clôture, être moi n'a pas de mesure

To belong to something - that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page

The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.

The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.