Quotes About Identity

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

You have to be somebody," Lanier writes, "before you can share yourself." But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as "natural" or "inevitable"—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale!

From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance.

A mortifying sense of porousness.

But here I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: this idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed. Because I find I agree with Zuckerberg: selves evolve.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.