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Quotes About Identity

My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she's an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen. There
~ Hope Edelman
Strange, now, how after so many years my mother's model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and "motherless" always overshadowed "daughter" in that phrase. Now I'm a motherless mother, and "mother" is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn't define me anymore.
~ Hope Edelman
The mother who abandons her daughter leaves a pile of questions behind: Who was she? Where is she? Why did she leave? Like the child whose mother dies, the abandoned daughter lives with a loss, but she also struggles with the knowledge that her mother is alive yet inaccessible and out of touch. Death has a finality that abandonment simply does not.
~ Hope Edelman
I'm not the same as you, father," he said quietly. And then once more he was shaken by great sobs, and screamed out in a voice of anguish, "I have eaten fairy fruit!
~ Unknown
Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.
~ Unknown
A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.
~ Unknown
And all that tribe.
~ Horace
The story's about you.
~ Horace
The half of my own soul.
~ Horace
The highlander's word "furriner" means to him what ???????? did to an ancient Greek.
~ Horace Kephart
The boys are caught between a private conversation among themselves, a world only they can understand, and their awareness of the artist, the adult observer looking and listening. They remind me of us, of me and my fellow patients, the garments of the adult world not quite fitting us, the jumbled machinery of the day-to-day not quite belonging to us, asked to give an account of ourselves and unsure quite what to say.
~ Unknown
A Christian is one who has been "crucified with Christ," who has died with Him, been buried with Him, risen with Him, ascended with Him, and is seated "in heavenly places" with Him (Rom 6:3-8; Gal 2:20; Eph 2:5-6; Col 3:1-3).
~ Horatius Bonar
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
~ Unknown
You are strangers, too, sine nomine, even to yourselves. They
~ Unknown
I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?
~ Howard Barker
To be black is to be a dissident.
~ Howard Bryant
He is a human being in kid's clothing. He has the organs and the feeling of his species, but none of the rights. And he is not alone. This country is stewing itself in the notion that you're not a person until you reach voting and drinking age. It's wrong. You don't get it, Doctor (with all due respect), and because you don't get it you can't give it. Let him go home. He isn't crazy, he isn't even strange. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
~ Unknown
every individual will develop relations to other persons, to domains of accomplishment, and to his or her self.
~ Unknown
That, Imperator, is of concern only to myself and to Titus. And further, do not address me as woman. My ancestors were priests at Jerusalem and kings at Megiddo when Rome was a circle of mud huts inhabited by brutes who had not yet learned to weave cloth or even to smelt copper. And as for this meeting, I think that I at least have had sufficient of it—and if you will permit me, I should like to go.
~ Howard Fast
If Agrippa was indifferent to the needs or desires of Berenice, he was by no means indifferent to her bloodlines; she could claim not only the Herodian and Hasmonean ancestry, but also the bloodline of King David and a trace of the Roman Julian Gens. There was the highest blood in Israel. Who could marry it?
~ Howard Fast
What happens to a wanderer?" Moses asked Neph. "Does he ever come home?" And Neph answered ruefully that wanderers were those who sought their home – not those who left it. The cryptic intent was not lost on Moses, and when Neph asked him how he felt, he replied, "I am a stranger here.
~ Howard Fast
There is nothing more important than being a man, just a plain, ordinary, human man. I know you think Spartacus is something more than a man. He isn't. If he were, then he wouldn't be any good at all. There is no great mystery about Spartacus.
~ Howard Fast
How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read . A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.
~ Howard Jacobson
Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.
~ Howard Jacobson