Quotes About Identity

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.

I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.

Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.

He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.

You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

I'm a world citizen with a New York set of balls.

It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.

She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are.

You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word identity has reached an end.