Quotes About Identity

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

The dead will think the living are worth it we will knowWho we areAnd we will all enlist again.

But is it really you behind the pretenses beyond dust and distances beneath the salt and the siren announcements and ancient impurities and decays that claim to be you

Most American citizens do not think of themselves as living in an empire but instead in a great nation that mostly does good things. The occasional failing, like the toppling of a government in a violent coup or the murder of civilians in an air strike, is "not who we are.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

You are a nobleman?" I eyed him and the others listening to us with a heavy sigh. "I am the Viscount of Marsdale. My father is the Earl of Dorshire." All eyes went wide. "Oh, stop, it is a mere accident of birth.

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

Before The World Was Made If I make the lashes dark and the eyes more bright and the lips more scarlet, or ask if all be right from mirror after mirror, no vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made. What if I look upon a man as though on my beloved, and my blood be cold the while and my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel or that he is betrayed? I'd have him love the thing that was before the world was made.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.

every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.

No woman loves me, no man seeks my help, Because I be not of the things I dream.

I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named 'himself'.

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

All I have is a voice.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.