Quotes About Identity

I wanted to be liked when I was younger, which I think a lot of us do; I'm not ashamed to say it. I was a product of my environment, a product of my culture.

I do not let anyone make me feel ashamed of being who I am.

We travel often to Asia, Africa, Europe, where they were born.

I live between Europe, America and Asia.

I grew up in Asia. I was born in Asia.

I even felt doubts at times as to his sex. If all usurers are like this one, I maintain that they belong to the neuter gender.

a true Provencal version of the Harlowe family.

Only just now she said to me, 'I am very happy, papa!' When they say 'father' stiffly, it sends a chill through me; but when they call me 'papa,' it brings all the old memories back. I feel most their father then; I even believe that they belong to me, and to no one else.

mere boy, who dances badly; besides, he has no fortune. And, after all, papa, none of these people have titles. I want, at least, to be a countess like my mother.

Some human beings obtain through love the power of transferring their self — their I — to the being of another; and when death takes that other, no life of their own is possible for them.

From time to time a few of them, noticeable for the rosaries hanging from their necks (dangerous as it was to carry that sign of a religion which was suppressed, rather than abolished) shook their long hair and raised their heads defiantly.

Hay ciertas personas que no tienen ya el mismo valor una vez separadas de los rostros, de las cosas y de los lugares que les sirven de marco.

Just as Clara Gazul is the female pseudonym of a distinguished male writer, George Sand the masculine pseudonym of a woman of genius, so Camille Maupin was the mask behind which was long hidden a charming young woman, very well-born, a Breton, named Felicite des Touches, the person who was now causing such lively anxiety to the Baronne du Guenic and the excellent rector of Guerande.

ci sono uomini-quercia, io sono forse solo un arbusto elegante, e ho la pretesa di essere un cedro.

there was no such piece of driveling nonsense in this world as a certificate of birth; that plenty of women were younger at forty than many a girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman is no older than she looks.

Manche Menschen sind wie Nullen, sie brauchen eine Zahl, die vor ihnen steht, und ihr Nichts erlangt dann zehnfachen Wert.

O que está faltando? Um nada, mas um nada que é tudo. Vocês têm a aparência da vida mas não expressam o seu excesso transbordante, esse não sei o quê que talvez seja a alma e que flutua enevoadamente sobre o invólucro[...]

We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman's line. Her people and her dirt, her trees,

How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn't even southern? That a Black child didn't have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they'd never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.

He unlocked the passenger door and it groaned open. "That door is loud," I said. "And this car is a gas guzzler." "That's the point," he said. "Negro men like big cars. We don't believe in conserving energy. After all we've been through, we deserve to be wasteful.

all this time, I been asking myself, why couldn't them crackers just leave us colored folks alone? Let

Henry Louis Gates's edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs's as well as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.

Sylviane Diouf's Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas is a must-read for anyone interested in Muslim history on the American side of the Atlantic.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.