Quotes About Identity

In a few years, fighting men began to think of themselves as a people apart, and loyalty to their birthplace gave way to loyalty to their leader.

Mom is old-fashioned about babies. Maybe it's because she was born male, but changed so she could experience her own pregnancy with Jamie, and then with me. I asked her why she never changed back and she said she was having more fun this way, she said I should make up my own mind…

If I am a homosexual, then I am that way by choice.

Stop acting like a Terran. Be a Hellan.

We'll never really tame this girl. We'll just learn to live with her." She used to say that a lot, even after I kept reminding her, "I'm not Kylee, I'm Kyle! I'm not a girl anymore. I'm a boy now.

I don't know why Jamie wanted to change, I think it's because he wanted to be like his dad. I know I wanted to change because I wanted to be like Jamie.

When Mom was a boy, she looked a lot different. I saw some old pictures once of my dad, and he had his arm around a boy who looked a little like Mom, but his hair was longer. Mom doesn't say much about life on Earth, so I guess it wasn't a very happy home for her. Like most everybody else, she and Dad left because they thought they could have a better life somewhere else.

I was standing on the longest tightrope ever. A suspension bridge between a rock and a planet. Caught in the middle, between Mom and Dad, Weird and Stinky. Not a child, not an adult, but something in-between.

You said something once, Charles, that has stayed in my head like a ball bearing bouncing around the inside of an empty steel drum. You said that it was your family too, and nobody ever asked you what you wanted. Well, this is me asking you. All of you.

Lots of people still wore pants and jumpsuits and worksuits of all kinds, but the longshirt is a permanent part of Hella's culture.

Nobody was anything anymore.

Alexei didn't bustle; he wore his madness like a badge.

There are three kinds of people in this modern world; gamer boy eunuchs, cell phone nymphos and book readers. The most valuable are the very vulnerable book readers.

There are people who follow a crowd and then there are people who follow a crowd and then there are people who follow a crowd.

The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.

Tourists reminded him of other places and elicited in him a prodding doubt that living here was what he wanted.

You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.

When one southerner was asked why so many people were killed in his region, he answered that "there were just more folks in the South that needed killing.

Some of these words appear in metropolitan French, but a person of Saintonge who speaks the parlanjhe of the region is uniquely called a goulebenèze, literally, a happy mouth.

Edward   Once they're dead, I find they keep changing. You think you've got hold of them. And it's like you say, 'Oh I see. So that's what she was like.' But then they change again in your memory. It drives you crazy. Now I'd like to find out just who she was.

Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

Gallimard: You have to do what I say! I'm conjuring you up in my mind! Song: Rene, I've never done what you've said. Why should it be any different in your mind?

Judge: But why would that make it possible for you to fool Monsieur Gallimard? Please--get to the point. Song: One, because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.

Don't forget: there is no homosexuality in China!