Quotes About Identity

My mother was a very Viennese type of Austrian, Bernie. We're always committing suicide, you know. Its a way of life for us.

Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I'm always saying, 'Who isn't a National Socialist when there's a gun pointed at his head?

But I now had a keener appreciation of why people became Nazis in the first place; perhaps it was like he said: that they wanted to get away from dead-end, no-account places like Saarbrücken, wanted to achieve some sort of status among their fellow men, wanted their shitty, insignificant lives to mean something, even if they could find that meaning only in being mean to others—Jews, mostly, but anyone who didn't agree with them would do.

Loud songs do not a patriot make.

The man uttering these words had a face like the Golem of Prague and a barrel-shaped body that belonged on a beer cart. He wore a short leather coat and a cap with a peak that grew straight out of his forehead. He had ears like an Indian elephant, a mustache like a toilet brush, and more chins than the Shanghai telephone directory

I can't help thinking that life isn't just about working out who we are and what makes us tick, it's also about understanding why we aren't where we ever expected to be.

The art of marketing is largely the art of brand building. When something is not a brand, it will be probably be viewed as a commodity.

Marrying left your maiden name disused.

Perhaps being old is having lighted roomsInside your head, and people in them, acting.People you know, yet can't quite name.

Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?

I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name & I am bid to John Hewitt's at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he's a homo? It's the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don't even care why he packed up writing.

To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn't know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.

The term disorder of the self is descriptive of a personality disorder because these patients are out of touch with themselves. They identify themselves with a facade, a false defensive self that they have developed to adapt to a world that they perceive as hostile.

In Wales, only about one in five inhabitants can speak Welsh (down from one in

such as nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Where they stand the greates

The car is still the ultimate symbol of German self-belief.

I felt like a character in a science fiction story, trapped in someone else's body, articulating someone else's words. To be frank, I bored even myself. And by the time I was thirty-six, my course was set, my die stamped, I knew I would never change.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

We must find you a new boyfriend, Wavey had kept telling her, but what if a girlfriend was what Fever needed? She felt as if she had opened the door to a room she had never noticed in a house where she'd lived all her life.

She was fifteen years old and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.

Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing deaf and stop herself from crying out.

My name," the boy said importantly, "is Stacey de Lacey." "But that's a girl's name!" blurted Oliver. Stacey de Lacey's face turned a dark shade of red. "Silence!" he shouted. "Stacey is one of those names that can be for a boy or a girl! Like Hilary, or Leslie, or...um... Anyway...!