Quotes About Identity

These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?

If you are embarrassed about your sex, it must mean that you feel there is something demeaning or disgusting about being female. You are all wondrously made, girls. Remember that: wondrously made, and you should carry your sex proudly, a badge of honor.

The world is full of unrequited love,' I said finally. 'You and Patrick having problems?' Dad said, reaching around to get the butter out of the fridge. 'No, I was just wondering what you would say if I was a lesbian.' 'Come again?' said Lester. 'I'm having a hard time following this conversation.

You are unique, just like everybody else.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it's easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer—or a spy; you've always got, analytically, a ticket out.

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere, and not the things that tie you down.

If they can't get to Europe, they'll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as "inauthentic," they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.

Airports say a lot about a place because they are both a city's business card and its handshake; they tell us what a community yearns to be as well as what it really is (much like the people inside them, often, who are dressed up for the occasion, and worn ragged and bare by the experience).

Home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

OH, YO JOVENCITO! Yo quería ser mi madre que me amaba, pero no quería amargarme a mí mismo. Y entonces fingía ser un joven pobre. No podía convencerme de que también en un burgués hubiera algo para amar: aquello que amaba mi madre en mí, puro y despreciado. Nada ha cambiado: me veo todavía pobre y joven; y amo sólo a aquéllos como yo. Los burgueses tienen un cuerpo maldito.

Yo soy una fuerza del pasado

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

Non si può impedire a qualcuno di farsi o disfarsi la propra vita, si tenta, si soffre, ssi lotta ma le persone non sono di nessuno, nel bene e nel male.

e noi stiamo bene a sentirci italiani e ne siamo anche fieri e orgogliosi che capiamo che questi legami qui sono nati tra la gente che lavora mica trattati a tavolino tra diplomatici o ministri del cazzo, che di loro ci vergognamo sì,altrochè.

Erano indefinibili e questo creava maggior imbarazzo.

Just as warmth brings to light our personalities and makes us feel special and indispensable, coldness can turn us into nameless shadows.

I swam to shore, therefore i am

Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

We might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books . . . around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person's individual relationship to books and to other people. Specific titles figure in these private libraries, but . . . they are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.

Un libro de verdad afecta en mayor o menor grado a lo que pensamos y, por tanto, a lo que somos. Cambia en cierta medida, el mundo que consiste, en parte, en la idea que tenemos de él, ya lo adorne y agrande, ya consuma su ruina No conozco libro, cuando ha importado, que no haya hecho temblar el suelo de la existencia, dislocado la visión pobre, burda que yo tomaba, antes de que la quebrantara, por la realidad.

W)e are Canadians and not Americans because of a foolish war that scarcely anyone wanted or needed, but which, once launched, no one knew how to stop.