Quotes About Identity

The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.

It's so easy to forget,' she murmured, 'how underneath, we're all exactly the same.

Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask...with nothing beneath it?

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint.

Skin color doesn't make you different,' Melody said. 'We're all the same on the inside.' 'The only people who ever say that,' Raymon replied, 'are white.

This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.

It's almost as if I had to stop running in order to see myself clearly, and what I see is a person who's been driving toward a goal for so long she can't remember why she set it in the first place.

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?

I remember reading a novel once that said the native Alaskans who came in contact with the white missionaries thought, at first, they were ghosts. And why shouldn't they have thought that? Like ghosts, white people move effortlessly through through boundaries and borders. Like ghosts, we can be anywhere we want to be.

It's funny, how fast life changes. One minute you are present, and the next, you might find yourself futilely trying to get back to the world you were once part of. You might find yourself looking for people who can no longer hear you. You are in the world, but not of it.

It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice... p 231

If you ask me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she's a good nurse, and she's a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn't a good nurse. And if I can't put a casserole on the table and cloth on your back, then I have to second guess myself as a mother too. If you don't let me do this, if you don't let me take care of you, then I don't know who i'm suppose to be anymore.

I exist," he said softly.

Your name, Minka. Short for Wilhelmina. You know what it means? Chosen protection.

I wondered what the hell had convinced me to live at the end of someone else's life rather than live my own

Besides, if you lump them all together because they're German, how does that makes you any different from the way they lump us all together just because we're Jews?

My sister likes to play the victim. We've had some pretty heated exchanges about that before. If you don't want to be seen as a stereotype, then the way I see it, don't be one. But to my sister, that means playing a white man's game, and being who they want her to be, instead of being unapologetically herself.

That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope. Because if it's not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are. —

One person's disability is another person's culture." As

Everyone comes with a label, it's up to you to peel it off.

He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience—names they could never live up to—and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation—crosses they'd always have to bear.

It seemed to Wren that having a mother had a lot less to do with a few sweaty hours of labor and delivery, and a lot more to do with whose face you always looked for in a crowd.

Suddenly Izzy's future no longer seemed impossible. It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you'd traveled was to remember the feeling of home.