Quotes About Identity

A girl named Brittany or Ashley would have fallen in love with the spandex costumes and the white skates of a figure skater, but when your name is Joanna and everyone calls you Jo, you grow up in Cleveland watching your older brother play hockey in the shadows of the steel mills and dream of the day when you can wear a jersey and carry a stick, waiting for your chance to slap that puck home.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

Faking your own death is illegal, yet faking your own life is celebrated

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.

Bunny slippers remind me of who I am.You can't get a swelled head if you wear bunny slippers. You can't lose your sense of perspective and start acting like a star or a rich lady if you keep on wearing bunny slippers. Besides, bunny slippers give me confidence because they're so jaunty. They make a statement; they say, 'Nothing the world does to me can ever get me so far down that I can't be silly and frivolous.

There's just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It's not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. Deep down, the dream-victim had said, You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

We are not strangers to ourselves; we only try to be.

Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

These days, people spent too much time striving to understand their feelings - and then ended up with none that were genuine.

she understood as never before that home wasn't a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.

If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.

There's more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there's no Other and there's just me alone, then I'm not the person I thought I was, I'm something twisted and terrible, terrible.

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

I couldn't bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, "Can I 'ave your name?" I said, "I am who I am." Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for "Ian Hoolihan".

Why can't I be a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim?

Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats. I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations.

Somos una nación de ingenieros que aspiran a ser reconocidos.

This, in a nutshell, is Hinduism, and I have been a Hindu all my life. With its notions in mind I see my place in the universe. But we should not cling!

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives.

Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

What are we without the ones we love?

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada, I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, Fresh off the boat are you? I blanched. My fingers which had seconds before had been taste buds savoring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn't dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh.