Quotes About Identity

as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.

If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of. If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother?

Can't you hear it? you said. When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

I sometimes wonder if it's just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they're supposed to be by going nowhere.

You know that the Greeks used to believe that people were made up of two heads and two bodies. But Zeus was afraid of how powerful that could be, so he split people in two. That way, instead of causing trouble for him, they spent the rest of their lives trying to find their other half.

We are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts we can't become.

What Trixie wanted, most of all, what she couldn't have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

That's because you've never been one. You haven't spent years wearing someone else's clothes, taking someone else's name, living in someone else's houses, and working someone else's job to fit in. And if you don't sell out, then you run away... proving you're the Gypsy they said you were all along.

But I think half the battle is figuring out what works for you, and I am much better at being a mother than I ever would have been as a lawyer. I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere. - My Sister's Keeper

Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don't fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you've ever known is being part of the group.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it's not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all. I

On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All of these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me. Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

Inside was my father's wallet, his reading glasses, his wedding ring. Identity, insight, heart: the only things we leave behind.

Until then she hadn't considered that there was a trade off, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

transgender?" "I like to think about it in terms of handedness," Dr. Powers explains. "If I asked you to sign your name with your nondominant hand, it would feel weird. If I asked you to describe it to me, you'd probably say things like the pen doesn't fit comfortably in my hand; or it's awkward; or I have to try hard to make legible something that I can do with my other hand effortlessly. It feels forced.

Don't say it. Don't say nobody's going to stare at me, because they will. Don't tell me it doesn't matter because it does. And don't tell me I look fine because that's a lie. I'm a freak, Mom. Look at me.

I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

so familiar that you slide back to the place where you fit.

That maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.

If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you really have one of your own?