Quotes About Identity

When the girl herself is absent, the room is like a blank page, almost no marks or clues to say anything about her, which perhaps does say something about her.

She herself has been taken by surprise at how much it matters to her, this buried question from long ago. She has thought of Salome many times over the years, of course she has. Whenever her mind has strayed in the direction of home, or no, that is, the farm, not her home any more, whenever her mind strays to the farm there lots of stones to turn over, and Salome is one of them. But that particular stone never seems to find a resting place, no matter how often it's turned.

My father's tongue, forever foreign to me.

Her own voice sounds echoey, as if somebody else is speaking.

And what about you? he asks Anton. What's happened since we last met? Oh, it's been good. What did you study? Never got there, actually. Had a few years of wandering around, then I settled down. Married my childhood sweetheart and been running the family famr ever since. Listens to himself with amazement. All of it true, all false.

The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.

And my marriage was perfect when I wasn't famous.

I never thought about being famous.

Why do you do it?' asked Drusher. 'And don't say "because someone must" or anything like that.' 'Why are you a magos biologis, Drusher, when that calling has apparently given you a life you resent?' 'Because I'm good at it,' said Drusher. 'Yes', said Eisenhorn. 'It's sad, isn't it?

I am Alpharius

If he speaks again without me knowing who he is, I will throw him out of the window. And I won't open it first.

Veeva squirmed up and down the length of me, vibrating like a coin operated motel bed. When she stopped kissing my mouth, I said, "It sounds so great, Veeva. Just you and me with our brand new plastic surgery noses, running for our lives, hating each other's guts... Both of us getting to look more and more like Michael Jackson every day.

If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar … but slightly uglier.

In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name.

Our ideal self is revealed in what we value (passion), how we understand the world (belief), and what we do to reach our ideal (behavior). Our passion, belief, and behavior fit together so intimately that I can say this with confidence: • What we do is what we really value.

If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.

We each see ourselves as being a certain kind of person with a specific set of values, beliefs, and dreams. In practice, however, we often are not what we want to be but instead end up choosing what others expect us to be. This is called our ought self. Avoid it.

So we grow up in a sea of stories told in a way that fits what we want others to know about us. The stories told in most families are a kind of propaganda. The tragedy is that often these stories are simply a form of dis-information... But our families name us without knowing the consequences. So our life is a journey to discover our true name, though; sadly many of us never choose to begin that search.

In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject.

Asking, "If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?" is like asking, "If there is no master, whose slave will I be?" If your purpose of life is to submit as a slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom who should detest.

What was my personal Big Bang? Did I get hooked on guns because I discovered I was good at precisely the moment I was experiencing my first feelings of masculine inadequacy? All I knew at the time was that the rifle range replaced the nurse's office as my place of refuge.

The kingdom of God cannot be co-opted. It cannot be subsumed by a political party and loses its soul if it seeks to identify with one.

Becoming nothing and no one was something she knew how to do.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?