Quotes About Identity

One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you. —JEANNE MOREAU

author Véronique Vienne recalled how she had to work hard to adapt to the mandated cheerfulness of American culture when she moved from France to the States; she practiced her smile in the mirror, trying her best to look like "Miss Congenial ity," before concluding that "in this country, the obligation we feel to conform to exalted standards of happiness can be pure misery.

As soon as you notice your first wrinkle and your first white hair, sigh with ease. You are well on your way to becoming who you always wanted to be." VÉRONIQUE VIENNE

When they're talking about me they're letting someone else rest.

I'm a woman. Forty-five in female years (which is about a hundred and thirty in male years - bastards).

Bring your own body.

I hit a low place," she began. "Perhaps it was the idea that fifty was looming. I don't know, but I felt off. Out of sync with myself.

I am an old punk.

My friends stood on the ground two feet below me, and miles away from understanding why I would want to sleep on a trailer platform... I couldn't possibly begin to explain what was only beginning to bud inside me: I wanted a home. I wanted to be at home, in the world and in my body (a feeling I had been missing since I'd woken up in the hospital) and somehow, in some as yet undefined way, I knew that windows in the great room and a skylight over my bed were going to help with that.

Fine. You're Lucious Landrum and I'm Annie Oakley. Can I go now?

Let's talk about the homoerotic undertones in sports, she said. Paul thrust his head forward as if he hadn't heard right. Excuse me?

Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?

This is the meaning of philosophy, insofar as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves.

When parents die, the dream dies, too—the dream that they will see you for who you really are (and, I suppose, the dream that they will ever be the parents you wish for).

A man doesn't recognize his own wife. Because she's happy.

realize I hate the word widow. It's sexless. I'm never using it again.)

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Call us what you will: we are made such by love.

So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.

What does one say to somebody who says: 'Whatever the sum total of the elements I am composed of I am still one entity. Now one cause has only one effect. I have always been one single cause and I have therefore only ever had one effect to produce. My existence in time is therefore nothing more than a series of necessary effects'?

Once upon a time there was a war...and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.

Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time? No wonder they call me Fuckhead. It's a name that's going to stick.

We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves.

Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?