Quotes About Identity

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.

So I wish you first a Sense of theatre; only Those who love illusion And know it will go far: Otherwise we spend our Lives in a confusion Of what we say and do with Who we really are.

Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

Here am I, Here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?

If a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both.

Only as I am, can I love you as you are

The great vice of our age […] is that we are all not only 'actors' but know that we are ('reduplicated Hamlets'), and that it is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it, that our real feelings break through.

My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...

A critter reveals his true self at midnight.

To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.

Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another.

Me gusta pensar que en otro tiempo fui un magnífico ejemplar peludo que vivía en los árboles y que mi cuerpo procede, a lo largo de un tiempo geológico, de la medusa, los gusanos y anfioxos, peces, dinosaurios y monos. ¿Quién querría cambiar eso por la pálida pareja del Jardín del Edén?

The work is to somehow talk ourselves beyond / the sleepiness of selfhood

When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.

My cradle was a shoe.

The gods are what has failed to become of us

The Hydra calls me but I am used to it It calls me Everybody But I know my name and do not answer

Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

I do feel very American. I think it's something I'm proud of and proud to be by chance born here. Honestly, that's something I think about.

I don't look like Halle Berry. But chances are, she's going to end up looking like me.