Quotes About Identity

I am the highest ranking woman in this land, and I know who I am, where I came from and where I am going. I know the traditions of my people and I have honored them all my life (The Conversion Of Ka'ahumanu 16)

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.

A girl's sense of her womanly self depends only in part on how closely she has followed her mother's example in attire and actions, or how much she loves or hates or respects her. It is from both parents that a girl gains her basic identity.

I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house - everything just so. In some ways I am my mother - full of life when I'm happy, very cold when I'm angry. People say I look just like her. I'll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye." - Karen, thirty-nine.

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.

Don't you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you're floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can't blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own.

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? 'For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.

I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise,

Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously.

But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy.

More than all those people who starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me.