Quotes About Identity

Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?

1. Podemos controlar lo que hacemos, pero no lo que somos. 2. Por otra parte, y simultáneamente, o que hacemos depende de lo que somos (de lo que hemos de hacer con ello), y lo que somos puede verse modificado por lo que hacemos. 3. Lo que hacemos es moralmente significante. Lo que somos, no.

La alabanza o la condena, la virtud o la culpa, han de aplicarse a nuestros actos, no a nuestra ascendencia ni a nuestra adscripción a este o aquel grupo.

Las afirmaciones de identidad no están libres de consecuencias. Limitan tanto como robustecen. Para mí, prefiero no tener una de esas identidades sencillas y públicas. No sé lo que soy, y no me apetece especialmente saberlo.

JACK: I don't understand why you feel like an onion.

Por él habría cambiado mi naturaleza. Me habría olvidado del titilar de las estrellas y de la música de la aurora, no habría vuelto a volar en mi vida (...)pero uno no puede cambiar lo que es, lo único que puede cambiar es lo que hace.

When he rescued me, he was young and strong and full of pride and beauty. I loved him at once. I would have changed my nature, I would have forsaken the star-tingle and the music of the Aurora; I would never have flown again—I would have given all that up in a moment, without a thought, to be a gyptian boat wife and cook for him and share his bed and bear his children. But you cannot change what you are, only what you do. I am a witch. He is a human.

You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn't argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can't choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I'm free.

When we are born we are magical and loving and full of wonder. But darkness and ignorance surround us at every corner. Until the day someone calls us a monster or a devil and we believe them.

The way you see yourself is important, you see. It's as if you carve yourself out of your own interpretation. And so I became the name I was called.

Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're people.

Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.

Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening and perfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously– and here is the source of much of our trouble-a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She is one confused Monkey, and, I'm afraid, not too very bright.

My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No otherness to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!

There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.

Noi siamo, dopotutto, la somma delle nostre esperienze, e l'esperienza comprende non soltanto ciò che facciamo concretamente, ma anche ciò che privatamente immaginiamo.

Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other. The one who looks most American—and he's the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that!

She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her.

She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.