Quotes About Identity

fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

O my America of the plains and the mountains and the valleys and the rivers and the canyons... It is with j'ust such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock.

Silk aveva qualcosa che la faceva sempre tornare all'infanzia e alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di essere visto per quello che è; ma anche alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di non essere sufficientemente guardato. Temeva di essere smascherata, moriva dalla voglia di essere al centro dell'attenzione: ecco il suo dilemma.

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But the white Israelis have taught them that, too—how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs.

But, alas, I could not lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life.

But then I thought, Why bestow on him all this thinking? Why the appetite to know this guy? Ravenous because once upon a time he said to you and to you alone, "Basketball was never like this, Skip"? Why clutch at him? What's the matter with you? There's nothing here but what you're looking at.

Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself.

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self. You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Christians behave like spies, living in one world while our deepest allegiance belongs to another.

Prayer is an expression of who we are…. We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

As a Jewish rabbi put it, A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, 'I am but dust and ashes.' On the other, 'For my sake was the world created.' And he should use each stone as he needs it.7-11

27The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered. 28Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[149] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome." 29Jacob said, "Please tell me your name." But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.

Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that really did not belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self.

To the question Do I matter? Jesus is indeed the answer.

God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves.

What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as "the one Jesus loves"? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?

How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.