Quotes About Identity

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning.

You're a library of me.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

oh he loves her, just as the English loved India & Africa & Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly. but maybe it is just the scenery that is wrong. maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can expect a happy ending.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, said Hifan proudly. Irie inhaled. Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, repeated Millat, impressed. That's a wicked name. It's got a wicked kung-fu arse sound to it. Irie frowned. KEVIN? We are aware, said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, that we have an acronym problem.

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?

And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.

Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old.

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left…