Quotes About Identity

Viet Thanh Nguyen

They send him away and no one ever sees him again. That's what happens to writers who put their names on things.

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

The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one's own people was always comforting.

Can you love someone you don't remember? Can you love someone you don't know?

I am a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim, as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled.

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.

Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I've had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer.

But for all we thought we knew about them, there were some things we knew we did not know even after many years of forced and voluntary intimacy, including the art of making cranberry sauce, the proper way of throwing a football, and the secret customs of secret societies, like college fraternities, which seemed to recruit only those who would have been eligible for the Hitler Youth. Not

It was a little past nine o'clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original.

Pidin itseäni runoilijana. Sinä pidit itseäsi toimittajana. Sinusta minä olin kohtalainen runoilija. Minusta sinä olit kohtalainen toimittaja.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

Art seems to be the only place we can liberate our many selves.

Vikram Chandra

I'm not a mouse or a tigress, she thought, I'm a hedgehog.

In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.

Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.

Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18.

A man is not a man until he leaves his home or has a house of his own.

A woman has either something to put on or nothing to take off.

Define yourself. Never give anyone any chance to define you by their definitions.

God gave you life not for how you define him but he wants to see that how you can define yourself.

Home is where you live your life and build your memories.