Quotes About Identity

And they would laugh at me. The dress was all sticking out around me and it was dark green with a pattern of animals with long tongues on it--and all the kids were laughing at me. And now I'm wearing a fur coat, and I'm in Berlin! And I would throw rocks at them and swear to myself that I would not be the kind that is laughed at, but that I would do the laughing.

Sometimes there are mirrors that make me look like an old woman. That's the way it's going to be thirty years from now.

But I could just as well turn into a Hulla--and if I became a star, I might actually be a worse person than a Hulla, who was good. Perhaps glamour isn't all that important after all.

Herr Kulmbach had been saying the Führer had united the whole German nation. Which is true enough, it's just that the people making up the whole German nation don't get on with each other. But that doesn't make any difference to political unity, I suppose.

There's got to be someone for me, who's breathing Berlin. And he will have black hair and a bowtie of white silk

You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.

Aye Oedipus, yir a complex fucker right enough

The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.

I myself have accepted the term [neoconservative], perhaps, because, having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice.

schizophrenic land of liberty

Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

She was at the age when she was starting to realize that her quirks weren't just an adolescent stage or a phase, they were who she was.

Any planet is "Earth" to those that live on it.

To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable.

Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.

ODESSA IS A NASTY PLACE. Everybody knows that.

I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

What a strange power there is in clothing.

For a subject people, independent statehood is a vital necessity and an advance; but once such a people has reached the stage of independence nothing can be more retrograde for it than to fix its mind on that stage and to refuse to look beyond it. The nationalism of a sovereign people cannot claim for itself the justification claimed by the nationalism of an oppressed people.

Building your personal brand is one of the few ways you can ensure that you don't stay broke.

Your personal brand when consciously built can be a force for good, or a force for destruction.

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.