Quotes About Identity

What Marx considered a divisive ploy is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats: to turn black and brown against white, female against male, gay and lesbian and transgender people against "heteronormativity." In 2020, Democrats intend to use these multiple lines of division to create the majority coalition that will implement their new form of identity socialism across the economic and cultural landscape.

Think about this: while black culture is a vibrant presence in America today, Indian culture is ignored, forgotten, virtually nonexistent. Even after the Holocaust, Jewish culture thrives, in Israel, America, and around the world. By contrast, American Indians seem still to bear the original shock of their displacement and virtual obliteration as a people.

My goal was to strip away the race card from the Democrats—a card they had been successfully playing against Republicans for a generation.

They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn't yet exist on a map." [...] I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn't. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn't let her. She didn't believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it, easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists

Puede que eso fuera la esclavitud del futuro, atar a un negro libre a sus anhelos de blanco.

How can a young man like to wear a beard?

She is a famous artists' model who claims to have been christened Topaz - even if this is true there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that.

People's clothes ought to be buried with them.

How queer to think that the old lady in the black military cloak was the Miss Milly who went to the dancing class! It makes me wonder what I shall be like when I am old.

Feeling like what, Cassandra Mortmain? Flat? Depressed? Empty? If so, why, pray? I thought if I made myself write I should find out what is wrong with me, but I haven't, so far. Unless — could I possibly be jealous of Rose? I will pause and search my innermost soul . . . I have searched it for a solid five minutes. And I swear I am not jealous of Rose; [..]

Just as putting a gender on a being limits in some way the way we think about the being. By putting any kind of label on anything, we limit it.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.