Quotes About Identity

Yes, I decided. My name could be Fella. I could stay with this man. I could be his dog, do what he told me, go where he went. That was what I was supposed to do, wasn't it? Stay with a person? I was pretty sure that was true. It felt right.

I'd been outsmarted by a man who named his goose Doris and thought it was a duck.

My life was going to be different from my mother's. She belonged to one person, to Walt. But I did not. I wasn't Mona's dog, or Patsy's, or Tyler's, or Eddie's. I belonged to all my friends. I was everyone's dog. I was surrounded by people who loved me, just like Grandad was. Suddenly, I understood that I was the luckiest dog in the world.

I loved being with my mother. I loved her closeness and her smell and her warmth. But I knew, deep down, that I should belong to a human family, just like my brothers and sisters. What if I never found my human family? What if nobody wanted me?

though this dog, like so many others in this place, was gigantic. That's when it occurred to me: it wasn't that the people and the dogs were huge; it was that I was little. I was a tiny little dog! I had met tiny dogs in my life, of course. But I had never before considered that I might be one—I had always been large, because people sometimes need the protection a large dog affords them.

All the men in my family were bearded, and most of the women.

But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others…. One feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two Souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American...

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.

I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way and let me go mine.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!

savage. Illiterate, unschooled in the Classics, but she and I have argued endlessly, night on end, about the nature of God, and why the universe was created the way it was. She stunned me the other day, proposed that nothing could have existed until God split into two to create duality. Only when the Godhead had broken into male and female could it begin to define itself. It has interesting possibilities, since only in duality can identity be measured against something else.

Todo el mundo piensa que no encaja del todo. Es parte de la maldición de ser humano.

The word sahib, which Sikhs use when they speak of the scripture, may become contentious in future. It was used respectfully in addressing, in particular, white men in the days of the Raj. The wife was known as the mem sahib, which indicated that her status derived from her husband. Sahib is used to acknowledge the status of the scripture in the same way, but some women writers may dispense with it, claiming that it reinforces the strong but unwarranted male dominance in the Sikh Panth.

Their children, now grown up and themselves parents, may visit Punjab less frequently. Many have never been to India and declare themselves to be British Sikhs, though experiences of racial discrimination and harassment make them uneasy about their status and future, so some move to what seems a more receptive North America. Events in India since 1984 have reminded them that Punjab is the Sikh homeland.

Let no one be proud of their birth. Know that we are all born from the same clay.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.