Quotes About Identity

If she is afraid of mirrors she is afraid of herself.

What's your name?' 'Names!' she sniffed, rolling her eyes. 'People always want names, don't they? They're mad about naming. I will let the moment name me.' she eyed Jack expectantly. 'You want me to name you?' he asked. 'People from the other side are very dull,' she sighed. 'Give yourself a name for me. I don't need naming for myself, do I?

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

Si conobbero. Lui conobbe lei e se stesso, perché in verità non s'era mai saputo. E lei conobbe lui e se stessa, perché pur essendosi saputa sempre, mai s'era potuta riconoscere così.

Às vezes a gente se imagina incompleto e é apenas jovem.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.

And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.

Memory really matters...only if it enables us to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

Chi oserebbe condannarti alla perdita del tu, catastrofe non meno terribile della perdita dell'io?

Chegando a qualquer nova cidade o viajante reencontra o seu passado que já não sabia que tinha: a estranheza do que já não somos ou já não possuímos espera-nos ao caminho nos lugares estranhos e não possuídos.

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.