Quotes About Identity

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. "My bad," for example, and "I've got your back" and "You go, girlfriend." They're the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he'd have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I've ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves.

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.

Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people.

True or not, it's important to have stories ? they are what give us the right to walk the earth and have a name.

Siempre quiso ver en la excitada modernidad de aquellos años en Madrid la explosión de un montón de reprimidos llegados de provincias que en la capital podían arrancase la máscara sin que sus padres, ni sus parientes, ni sus vecinos del pueblo pudieran verlos. El anonimato de la gran ciudad es lo único que nos permitió ser libres.

Ningún hijo quiere conocer a fondo a sus padres. Sería demoledor. Todos se creen el primer humano sobre la tierra.

Nosotros somos gente normal. Ésa era la absurda definición que mi padre hacía de nosotros. Luché contra ello, con el deseo callado de no ser normal, de ser alguien especial. Pero nunca pude sacudirme de encima ese estigma, el de ser normal.

later, he put such questions before us. If all the trappings were stripped away, leaving only my true self, who would I be? Am I living fully as that self in every moment? And when it ends, will my story have meaning

The Kingdom of God includes everyone, that is everyone to the degree that they bring forth the fruits of it.  It excludes nobody but those who exclude themselves by not bringing forth any fruits."* So the Kingdom of God cannot be identified with any earthly nation whether it be the Jews, the Romans, the British or the Americans. Paul told us in Galatians 3:28-29:

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

David W. Blight

For black Americans, Exodus is always contemporary, history always past and present.

Above all, Douglass is remembered most for telling his personal story—the slave who willed his own freedom, mastered the master's language, saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as perhaps no one else ever has in America.

I wish I knew what he called himself. I'm sure that treecats have their own names for themselves." "Me, too," Stephanie agreed, "and I bet they have their own names for us, too. I just hope mine isn't 'Source of Celery.

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.

We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.

In fact, we have suffered under a variety of illusions about who and what we are that have kept us trapped in a prison of materialistic thought.

Recognizing the illusion of celebrity and the truth of Elvis-Marilyn Syndrome, and learning to be at peace with who you are, is a key element of the ascension process. You ultimately have to choose to be happy no matter how many goals and successes you seem to have achieved—and a life of simplicity can be far more rewarding than the constant chaos involved in being a public figure.

Doing time in a Disposable Body.

It was typical of the American to identify the one unfinished strand.

A steel door clapped open as a guard stepped from the bulletproof viewing station across the hall. Adams! That you? I told you, I don't know- The cop pointed straight at him. Jeffrey Adams! Front and center! The black man helped him rise to his feet. Ain't everybody gets called back from the pit, man. Question is, what are you gonna do when you find out who you are?