Quotes About Identity

How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

The kind of relationship I had with my mother didn't make me gay. I had that kind of relationship with my mother because I was gay.

Straight people don't have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed. [...] Young straight people are less likely to question the choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them. [...]A lot of straight people move through life following a script that others wrote for them.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

No, she doesn't know it's me. I'm in disguise. Look, I know someone who does this with just a pair of glasses. And I have glasses AND a moustache.

Say, what's the question mark for? Sexual identity?

I'm a little uncomfortable with all of this.' 'With what?' 'Well... doesn't it feel weird that we're only beating up... ...Asian people?' 'We're in Hong Kong. The bad guys are Asian. The good guys are Asian. Everyone here's Asian.' 'I'm just used to beating up people of all races and creeds. That's how I do it in New York. ...

At the age of 11 I was about 6 ft. tall and my voice had completely broken. That caused problems. I was this gangly, spotty, very unattractive kid. I wasn't cool and I wasn't a nerd. I didn't even want to fit in with anyone.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

I've never tried to find my real parents. I'm very grateful to my mum and dad for adopting me - they're completely incredible people. It was my dad who encouraged me to question everything, to forge my own path, to think, to read. I always felt it was my right to question everything.

Yes. That's why it's so hard to look in a mirror. You are looking at yourself, but you don't recognize yourself. It's a shock. The person you see is older, and heavier, and has wrinkles. But you don't feel that way inside, and it's hard to believe that's how you really look now, how other people see you.

Sports can unify the Iraqi people - no Sunnis, no Shiites, just sport for the country.

had a smattering of chest hair that looked

I'm open-minded. I don't consider myself gay or hetero, I just am. I've had experiences all over the planet but it always comes down to just me, but I think at this point if I had an ongoing relationship I believe it would be with a man.

I've just become a character, we all have, in a story we don't get to write ourselves.

I got rid of my teeth at a young age because I'm straight. Teeth are for gay people. That's why fairies come and get them.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

It interested Carrie, where the film was going, however obvious its point; how enslaved we are by our bodies, our selves concealed. How much are we our bodies? And why is it so different for women? Why is Nicole's tumid, faded person so much less appealing than worn, old Jack? And it isn't just success or money. It is men and women. Carrie felt a heat rise in her face.

A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word.

When I turned fifty, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realized I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing—just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.

Yet somehow living as a 1912 woman or as an 1860 woman involved being on Facebook a lot.

I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time.