Quotes About Identity

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation — as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

Und allmählich glaube ich, dass Geburtsorte Zufälle sind, dass alles ein Zufall ist. Aber wenn du das glaubst, wohin kannst du dann noch? Was machst du dann? Was ist dann überhaupt noch wichtig? Während Samad mit verstörtem Blick diese Dystopie beschrieb, merkte Irie beschämt, dass das Land der Zufälle sich für ihre Ohren wie das Paradies anhörte. Wie Freiheit.

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath.

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.

When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur.

People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence

Hey! 'Hey!' But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.

Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York's Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

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. When

I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self. So

our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

People like us, we can't be nostalgic. We've no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And 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.

If you are truly telling a South African story then it will be political — because you are dealing with people who lead political lives in an environment which is highly politically charged.

I got a few gray hairs to testify to my wisdom, 2 grand babies & long. black dido named Harry...

I must tell you—because you mightn't come back, she whispered. You must know what—what I think of your goodness—of you. Always I've been tongue-tied. I seemed not to be grateful. It was deep in my heart. Even now—if I were other than I am—I couldn't tell you. But I'm nothing—only a rustler's girl—nameless—infamous. You've saved me—

Small country, small men.

A bird is a bird Slavery means slavery A knife is a knife Death remains death

And if the City falls but a single man escapes. He will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile. He will be the City.

So is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentleman separated once and for all and said this is the subject this is the object we fall asleep with one hand under our head and with the other in a mound of planets our feet abandon us and taste the earth with their tiny roots which next morning we tear out painfully

we spend one-third of our lives immersed in the media. Our abilities to speak, think, form relationships with others, even our dreams and our own sense of identity are now shaped by the media. So, studying the media is studying ourselves as social creatures.