Quotes About Identity

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Michel en a marre d'être seul. Alors il s'est amputé d'une partie de son cerveau, histoire de ne pas voir la fille comme elle était: une emmerdeuse de premier ordre.

She's lost her links to her old world, but she has never felt close to the one she's in now. She's torn in different directions, at a loss.

Mais, à ce moment précis, je me suis sentie femme, salement femme, comme je ne l'avais jamais senti, comme je ne l'ai plus jamais senti. Défendre ma propre peau ne me permettait pas de blesser un homme.

Je suis plutôt King Kong que Kate Moss, comme fille. Je suis ce genre de femme qu'on n'épouse pas, avec qui on ne fait pas d'enfant, je parle de ma place de femme toujours trop tout ce qu'elle est, trop agressive, trop bruyante, trop grosse, trop brutale, trop hirsute, toujours trop virile, me dit-on.

Men are trapped in a different dichotomy, that which gives them a hard-on must remain a problem. Above all, no reconciliation. Because a peculiar thing about men is that they tend to despise that which they desire, as well as despising themselves for the physical manifestation of that desire.

It wasn't by accident. I consented to become a weaker person.

Changer, c'est toujours perdre un bloc de soi. On le sent qui se détache, après un temps d'adaptation. C'est un deuil et un soulagement en même temps.

When I was hospitalized at the age of fifteen, the psychiatrist asked me why I had made myself so ugly. I thought he had nerve asking me that, since I thought I looked pretty damn cool with red spiky hair, black lips, white lace tights, and outsize army boots. He insisted, was I afraid of being pretty? He said that I had such lovely eyes.

Entre la montre Kitty et le bracelet clouté, elle n'avait pas encore choisi son camp.

I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls who don't get a look in the universal market of the consumerable chick. I'm making no excuses for myself. I'm not complaining. I would never swap places, because it seems to me that being Virginie Despentes is a more interesting business than anything else going on out here.