Quotes About Identity

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When

Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: becoming someone.

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

When existential depression attacks without warning, your father dyes his hair.

Like a number of people who resemble him, over time Arthur concocted himself a persona of the modern man with his panoply of noble attitudes, his frenzied openmindedness, and his pact with mediocrity.

What stuff is a man made of, who has freed himself of his wounds?

Finally it doesn't matter whether you're a cork on the water or a man chasing his own grail.

if you wanna be somebody be yourself dont try to be anybody your not

Twenty years old, I had embarked on this trip to Izu heavy with resentment that my personality had been permanently warped by my orphan's complex and that I would never be able to overcome a stifling melancholy. So I was inexpressibly grateful to find that I looked like a nice person as the world defines the word. -from The Dancing Girl of Izu

Why had God created man's face so that he might not see it himself? 'Suppose you could see your own face, would you lose your mind? Would you become incapable of acting?' Most probably man had evolved in such a way that he could not see his own face. Maybe dragonflies and praying mantises could see their own faces.

Tu eÈ™ti singurul care nu-È›i vezi propria fa??. ÎÈ›i atingi zilnic figura convins fiind c? imaginea reflectat? ar fi cea pe care o vezi direct. Ky?ko r?mase un timp pe gânduri, întrebându-se ce sens o avea oare faptul c? Dumnezeu i-a f?cut pe oameni astfel încât s? nu-È™i poat? vedea chipul.

Is it a boy or a girl? It's a girl. Really! Can't you tell by looking at it? Is it mine? It is not. Oh? Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say when you feel like it. Years and years from now. It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things.

Only my penis is still free and happy, no good for sword fights and no good for any work, or even for hanging things on, or for digging trenches. Praise be to God that it is so.

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed.

You change the world by being yourself.

The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to "have it all," the sooner it will die.

Patagonia's authenticity lies in not being concerned about having an image in the first place.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.