Quotes About Identity

Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.

So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends catch up with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world.

We are the same and not the same, uniquely other, but with pages of shared history.

She had a very traditional Catholic upbringing and that didn't deter her. On the contrary it strengthened her determination to be true to herself, to follow her heart, even though it meant enduring a lot of self-sacrifice. Intrigued

he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

I like this little animal so much, and since my new name is Pawe? [Paul], I think his should be Piotr [Peter]. Then we can be two disciples!

A frog croaked a deep throaty I am .

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

Every Difference is a Likeness too.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be.

No matter how many people care about you, she thought, if you can't be open with them about who you truly are, you're still alone.

True,) the white hole said. (My name is Khairelikoblepharehglukumeilichephreidosd'enagouni-) and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors that was evidently the visual translation.

Hervey Cleckley, M.D., from The Mask of Sanity

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

A child is not an empty vessel.... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.

I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.

Un nacimiento no es, en realidad, una introducción. Nuestra vida, cuando empieza, no es realmente nuestra, sino la continuación de la historia de otro.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them.

They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person—some stranger—had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a thing?