Quotes About Identity

My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as "Joan's husband." Marriage is the classic betrayal.

You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.

What these men represented was not "the West" but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and the other.

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 know have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

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 that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then?

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; 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.

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. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and 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.

la historia de un hombre que regresa a un lugar que amó y se encuentra a las tres de la madrugada haciendo frente al conocimiento de que él ya no es la persona que amó ese lugar y ya no volverá a ser nunca la persona que había querido ser.

Trabajo cincuenta horas semanales y reconozco que a veces no tengo tiempo para «ser todo lo que puedo ser»

Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.

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

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the name of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.

In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

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 4AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. 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.