Quotes About Identity

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Just so. I am what I am. To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

Nous ne sommes pas des bêtes idéalisées. Nous sommes d'imparfaits mortels, conscients de cette mortalité alors même que nous la rejetons, trahis par notre propre complexité, ainsi faits que lorsque nous pleurons nos pertes, c'est aussi, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, nous-mêmes que nous pleurons. Tels que nous étions. Tels que nous ne sommes plus. Tels qu'un jour nous ne serons plus du tout.

O mal de origem com que o homem nasce. Nós não somos animais selvagens idealizados. Somos seres mortais imperfeitos, conscientes dessa mortalidade mesmo quando a negamos, traídos por nossa própria complexidade, tão incorporada que quando choramos a perda de seres amados também estamos chorando, para o bem ou para o mal, por nós mesmos. Pela perda daquilo que éramos. Do que não somos mais. Do que um dia não seremos de todo.

the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, we forget who we really are.

Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

I am what I am. To look for «reasons» is beside the point.

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.

there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went but where is the school-girl who used to be me, and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live..