Quotes About Identity

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves?

I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer

I am the false character that follows the name around.

But she missed simple things, parents' birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn't have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.

I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.

We still want what we want. We want a haircut.

His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.

We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.

She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system.

El sexo nos descubre. El sexo nos revela como somos. Por eso es tan estremecedor. Nos despoja de toda apariencia.

What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can't know and they can't tell us.

Where do you live? In the hearts of men, Sullivan said.

Rocks are, but they do not exist.' After a pause I said, "I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. 'Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.'

It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.