Quotes About Identity

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.

How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. I

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.

She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother.

Because: if our secret defines us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another?

Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I've got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can't.

Because—isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart.

They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it. "And how can we lose this maddening

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.

it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

You know,' said Francis, on the way out, 'I once made the mistake of asking Bunny if he ever thought about Sin.' 'What did he say?' asked Camilla. Francis snorted. 'He said No, of course not. I'm not a Catholic.

Son nuestros secretos los que nos definen, y no la cara que mostramos al mundo.

Un grande dolore, che comincio a comprendere solo adesso: il cuore non si sceglie. Non possiamo obbligarci a desiderare ciò che è bene per noi o per gli altri. Non siamo noi a determinare il tipo di persone che siamo.

exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—" he laughed, sadly—"there wasn't much room for three.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

And the daughter . Bit of a social failure. Well, that's putting it delicately. Quite overweight. Collects the cats, if you know what I mean.