Quotes About Identity

My Muslim beliefs lived just left of my heart. I was leaving space for something more promising.

Before the world as they knew it ended, they stepped out in heels with straightening-comb burns on their ears, gartered stockings, and lipstick for the first time.

As we dance, I am not Melody, I am a narrative, someone's almost forgotten story. Remembered.

God'll make a butt-ugly boy, but I ain't never seen him make a ugly girl child.

Maybe this was the moment when I knew I was part of a long line of almost erased stories. A child of denial. Of magical thinking.

Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She'd always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn't match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through.

Don't even know they're in the presence of royalty when they ask, How come you all sit together? without checking their own all-white tables.

When I took these things from the house: some tapes, some books, my winter clothes, I did not know that these would become the things I own.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

My brother drove me to the subway, kissed my forehead, and hugged me hard. When had he become a man? For so long, he had been my little brother, sweet and solemn, his eyes open wide to the world. Now, behind small wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a figure out of history. Malcolm maybe. Or Stokely.

When you're young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don't know how to explain. For a long time, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn't.

I wanted to climb into her world and live in it with her. She was beautiful and kind and funny and identified as "certified crazy." I learned that certified crazy meant nothing to lose, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be self-conscious about.

Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn't matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you're forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We're different that way.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Et je comprends soudain que perdre son nom équivaut à perdre son ombre ; se réduire à son nom c'est se réduire à son ombre.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

how can I say 'I love you', if I know the love is you .. the word 'love' either as a verb or a noun would be destroyed in front of you

I rightly pass for an atheist.

The more you add to what you have, the less you are. Accumulating more, concentrating all your effort in the quest for things you can have, means losing your being in the process.... Being involves something different than the quest for having. Adding to what you have means losing your being.

C'est à vous d'être lacaniens, si vous voulez. Moi, je suis freudien. (You can be Lacanians, if you want. As for me, I'm a Freudian.)

perhaps I am a Lacanian because I formerly did Chinese

If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.