Quotes About Identity

Johnstone railway station was small, neat and tidy, quite attractive. On the platforms, I noticed that the signs also had the name in Gaelic – 'Baile Iain', literally 'John's town'. It is a recent wheeze by the triumphant, all-conquering Scottish National Party to add the Gaelic name to every station in the whole of Scotland, despite the fact that most of these places never had a Gaelic name or people who ever spoke Gaelic.

He who makes a beast of himself relieves himself the pain of being a man.

Contrary to what Pakistani children are taught in schools, the Islamic ideology currently in vogue in Pakistan did not give birth to the country; it was born after Pakistan's creation in its present form.

The traditional ulema and Islamists used the environment of jihad to advance their own agenda, and one agenda item was that they should be accepted as custodians of Pakistan's ideology and identity. After the war, several state-sponsored publications were devoted to building the case that one Muslim soldier had the fighting prowess to subdue five Hindus.

Pakistan's young median age today means that an overwhelming majority of its current inhabitants were born in a country called Pakistan and, therefore, do not need an explanation other than their birth to be its citizens.

In the process of moulding a nation on the basis of Islam, Pakistan has ended up earning for itself the reputation for being home to the world's angriest Muslims.

The faith I was born into formed me.

People look at you a certain way and somehow you wind up being that way.

If your self-worth is based on anything other than your relationship with Christ, you are in big trouble.

If your self-worth is dependent on anything external, you are in big trouble.

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.

Don't let fashion dictate your style.

The strength of an artist lies in how much of themselves they are prepared to reveal in their art.' Iain Cameron Williams, 2021, 'Other People's Dreams' to be published in 2022.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Exile. It is not simply being homeless. Rather, it is knowing that you do have a home, but that your home has been taken over by enemies. Exile. It is not being without roots. On the contrary, it is having deep roots which have now been plucked up, and there you are, with roots dangling, writhing in pain, exposed to a cold and jeering world, longing to be restored to native and nurturing soil. Exile is knowing precisely where you belong, but knowing that you can't go back, not yet.

Manybear the label "Christian," yet their Christianity has no real impact on life-defining decisions, just as Elimelech bore the name "My God is king" yet lived in a way that made it evident that God wasn't his king at all. The roads we choose for ourselves often make our deepest heart commitments plain for all to see.

Why not add another yarn? That's all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.

Rather than renouncing the ephemeral thoughts and emotions that bolster self-identity, Tantra, or Vajrayana, seeks to transform them into potent catalysts for entering deeper, less restricted strata of consciousness, and unveiling the enlightened mind of wisdom and compassion said to be inherent within all beings.

We are what we believe we are at given times.

The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche—that

Even though I decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never leave me. I arrived in Tokyo when I was still unformed, callow and eager for experience. I can only hope that this eagerness will never be entirely dissipated. To be fully formed is to be dead. But Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

Why isn't everybody the way they were at first? I wonder.

I stared so long that I got to seeing them as being dark, ugly sins in my body, smelling and dirty, but my touch face showed that I didn't give a damn. I was the toughest person in the whole world. And then inside the outline of my body a devil's face slowly took shape. It came to my chest, a dark, ugly thing with big lips that looked hot around yellow pointed teeth, eyeing me in a friednly way, as though it had been feeding on what was inside me and was trying to show how pleased it was.