Quotes About Identity

How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

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

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free. You could be anyone, he thought. You could be anyone.

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished. His made-up wife. His invented father. His pretend childhood. He wonders if it is possible to unlie yourself.

no wonder i let queers suck my cock

The passion has never left me. I live as two people - myself, Dan Fante, and Bruno Dante or Mickey Di Salvo, or whoever I say I am in one of my books. I can tap that Bruno character any time I need to. He lives inside me like a quiet, simmering pool of magma. Years ago I stopped feeding him with booze and he was kind enough to stop trying to kill me. That's our truce.

Maybe she should give up. Not by turning herself in, but by flying away. Travel back across the Atlantic. Become a Canadian. Live a tranquil life in the 'burbs of Toronto. Marry a bland businessman who drank Molson and followed the Maple Leafs.

Claims to ordinariness and salt-of-the-earth virtue—"slumming it," as it's crudely called—are themselves pretentious. The assumption that dropping your aitches or asserting a love of a cheap beer over a fine wine, or processed cheese over a Parmesan, will make you seem unspoiled or somehow more gritty is classic downwardly mobile play-acting.

But it's the cool silence of that stone church that I remember the most. It was heady and gave me life. It was there that I could escape the scrutiny and expectations of being a child of color and the son of a preacher.

Leaving Identity Issues to Other Folks

As far as nanny work goes, I struck gold. Yet I was uncomfortable with being a college graduate and working as a less-cool version of Mary Poppins.

Mr. Jack." "But your name

If your blood didn't flow, you would die, Arlo," said Andrea, who calls me by my real name because she knows I don't like it.

He looked a little like a lady dressed like an army guy. When he got to the bottom, the army guy with the wig stood all straight and proud at attention. He gave us a salute.

You may not believe this," he told me, "but I was a boy once." "Just once?" I asked. "I'm a boy all the time.

What Do You Want to Be?

The next morning everybody was wearing the official school uniform. The boys had on light blue shirts, blue pants, and blue ties. The girls had on blue skirts with stripes on them. I looked like a dork. But everybody looked like a dork, so I didn't feel so bad.

She must be the tallest person in the history of the world! Miss Small was the opposite of her name. It was like a fat guy was named Mr. Thin or a dumb guy was named Mr. Smart or a really handsome guy was named Mr. Ugly or…well, you get the idea.

My voice is the same

People are what they do. They are what they say. They are what they want. They are what they remember and what they have forgotten; the motives they reveal and the motives they try to hide. They are their bodies, their voices, the movements of their eyes and hands. Beneath these and other such manifestations of selfhood, it is impossible to go. The "reasons" why people are as they are will always remain hidden not only from outsiders but from themselves too.

Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.