Quotes About Identity

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.

He was suffering from wanderlust, complicated by the tension of knowing that he was rooted to this town by something as simple as his name.

She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.

She is not the child that mirrors me, and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It's not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.

they accepted any baggage that came with you and made you believe you were more than you actually were

There was blood, so much blood that it painted his face and stained his hair. There was blood, so much blood that several moments passed before I recognized my father.

I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family. Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.

I had become a bridge between the natural world and the human one. I fit into both places and belonged to neither. Half of my heart lived with the wild wolves, the other half lived with my family. In case you cannot do the math: no one can survive with half a heart.

No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

People are never who they seem to be

THEY PUT ME IN CHAINS. Just like that, they shackle my hands in front of me, as if that doesn't send two hundred years of history running through my veins like an electric current. As if I can't feel my great-great-grandmother and her mother standing on an auction block. They put me in chains, and my son—who I've told, every day since he was born, You are more than the color of your skin—my son watches.

When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn't—mercy—did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn't know who he was anymore.

See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn't get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.

You can put a pig in a ball gown, Minka. That doesn't make it a debutante.

The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center.

We are all just canvases for our scars.

I eat kung pao chicken like it's going out of style, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an Asian cell in my body. I love Toni Morrison novels although I'm not black. I'm straight and I'm happily married. The reason I work here is because I think you deserve that, too.

What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit? How

My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. "Yes," she said. "But see how much of me is left?"  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

What good was a personal victory to someone who'd spent her life losing herself for the greater good of everyone else?

Sometimes when you pick up your child, you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood. Finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.

But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

She had nothing left inside. She'd given it all to her son. And that was the greatest heartbreak of all—no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.