Quotes About Identity

The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn't a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus.

I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.

At the top of the page I wrote my full name [...] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur.

I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me — not even if I cried out.

I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.

Mariah says, "I have Indian blood in me," and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?

That "these people" were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me.

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.

I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be

Something I had always known - the way I knew my skin was the color brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth, or the way I knew my own name - something I took completely for granted, "the sun is shining, the air is warm," was not so.

But I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me, my own self, though at that time I did not know that myself constituted such a thing as existence

I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven.

I said, "All along I have been wondering how you got to be the way you are. Just how it was that you got to be the way you are.

How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?

I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven.

All masters of every stripe are rubbish, all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this...Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

Je comprends seulement maintenant pourquoi les gens mentent sur leur passé, pourquoi ils disent qu'ils sont une chose autre que la chose qu'ils sont réellement, pourquoi ils s'inventent un être qui ne présente aucune ressemblance avec qui ils sont réellement, pourquoi quiconque voudrait avoir le sentiment de n'être de nulle part, de ne venir de personne, d'être tombé du ciel, voilà tout, complet.

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming

they were talking about themselves, and they seemed to take for granted that everything they said mattered. They were artists. I had heard of people in this position. I had never seen an example in the place where I came from. I noticed that mostly they were men. It seemed to be a position that allowed for irresponsibility, so perhaps it was much better suited to men.

I said that she had acted like a saint, but that since I was living in this real world I had really wanted just a mother.

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.