Quotes About Identity

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?

Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore? I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt. What guilt? The guilt of being innocent victims.

We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we're all the same.

No, no, no, no. Who are you? What is this? Don't leave. They're leaving. They've left.

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?

That's what it all comes down to in the end. A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?

But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I'd never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.

I am a bad actor. Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into. I'm all idea today. I definitely don't see it. I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely, he said.

Tyle w nich by?o chrze?cija?stwa. I tak niewiele z Chrystusa.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children

But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

Sometimes I think everything I've done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don't know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.

We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.

It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. I don't know who you are, she said, but I'm sure you must be somebody.

I'd been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The

I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.