Quotes About Identity

You step out of the shower and the entire nation calms— a drop of lemon-egg shampoo, you smell like bees, a brief kiss, I don't know anything about you—except the spray of freckles on your shoulders! which makes me feel so thrillingly alone. I stand on earth in my pajamas, penis sticking out— for years in your direction.

I am your boy drowning in this country, who doesn't know the word for drowning and yells I am diving for the last time!

A man should smell better than his country

Deafness isn't an illness! It's a sexual position!

We are simply spirits in a shell. The body is merely a covering, a casement for the soul.

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn't imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that.

Mom talked a good game about the power of blackness, but she knew that the white world held even more power. You just needed to find a way to break in.

Papa, who instructed us to always hold our heads up, who promised us we were worthy, who assured us we were descended from kings—and from architects and farmers and healers and visionaries—no matter what all the hateful people in the world had to say about us.

I'm making friends. Feeling good. My new name makes me feel lighter on my feet. With a new name, anything is possible.

I have always been proud to be my father's child. And an important part of my journey has been to accept the part of myself that is my father. It is a privilege to carry his work and his legacy forward. I will always strive to walk in his footsteps and become the best person I can, and I invite you to do the same. (Author's note)

Here and now, I don't want to be Detroit Red. I want to slip the skin of this life, to be new and clean again.

I am my father's son. But to be my father's son means they will always come for me. They will always come for me, and I will always succumb.

We all chanted one of Garvey's famous phrases together: Up, up you mighty race. You can accomplish what you will.

So he's nervous about me making trouble at the bus stop. It makes me want to laugh. Just as truthfully, I could've told him I was class president. On the football team. Straight-A student. But what was interesting about any of that?

I had to second-guess everything. The classmates who had elected me president—did they really think I was the best in the class, or was I just a novelty object they wanted to play with?

I couldn't ever be more than that in Lansing. Can't ever be more anyplace, it turns out, as long as I wear this brown skin. I used to think things were different, because Papa used to tell me stories about all the great things I could be and could do. But now I understand. Now I know they were just stories. Just ideas in his head.

I have to learn to talk like the guys down the Hill. The "cats" down the Hill, that is. I have to be hip.

Me, I'd rather be out in that world than stuck in those closed-up ivy halls that weren't meant to fit me.

Offers herself up whole, without conflicts, a woman who is many things, all at once.

What, by analogy, happens to the family of the university, or the town, or the state, or the Old Dominion, or the nation itself, given what has been built into its creation?

I identify it (i.e., Kadesh Barnea) with Mecca.

You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.

The year you become famous is the year you stop growing as a person. Like, Michael Jackson became famous at five or something, which is why he is permanently five. He wants to play children's games, hang out with kids, build a bloody fun fair in his backyard, and eat sweeties. Robbie Williams was 16, which is why he is always shagging girls and behaving like a teenager. George [Clooney], on the other hand, was nearly 40, which is why he is such a delightful, well-rounded individual.

There is so much debate about moderate and radical Islam but there is only one Islam.