Quotes About Identity

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod...

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

Just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way.

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthat some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external...

Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

The problem is that I'm Josef Weber's friend. but Reiner Hartmann is my enemy. So what do I do, now that they are the same man?

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.

Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.

Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won't catch anyone's attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.

Wondering why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience - names they could never live up to - and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation - crosses they'd always have to bear.

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

I'm at the age where that's a surprise, where I still think I'm going to see a younger woman rather than the one who blinks back at me.

Employment deprives you of purpose

Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn't dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid's view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.

A rich man is most coveted but I'd be damned if I be a poor woman

I have heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.You ask me what to do about them.It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race.Face that one first.

But I've learned now that your hard work and dedication will pay off, if you dare to be different. Because why would I want to be anything other than myself?

Whoever has the power takes the noun while the less powerful get an adjective. No one wants her achievements modified.We all just want to be the noun.

My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.