Quotes About Identity

you can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ~ Odysseus

Have you no memories?" 'I am made of memories.

The question stung. If I had been a proper daughter, he would not have had to ask. I would have been perfect and gleaming with beauty poured straight from my father's source.

After I was born - and maybe that is not the right word, but if not, then I don't know what is. Woke? Hatched? No, that is worse. I am not an egg. I will say born.

Patroclus" It was the name my father had given me, hopefully but injudiciously, at my birth, and it tasted of bitterness on my tonge. "Honor of the father," it meant. I waited for him to make a joke out of it, some witty jape about my disgrace. He did not. perhaps, I thought, he is too stupid to.

This, out of all of it, was perhaps the strangest: that he was their commander now. He would be expected to know them all, their names and armor and stories. He no longer belongs to me alone.

It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality.

But what I've got to do if I'm to keep any self-respect at all, he thought, rising stiffly from the bench, while his teeth chattered, is to accept my cowardice, take it all for granted, and think of myself as a nervous insignificant book-worm, who can't do anything but teach Latin and be petted by Miss Le Fleau!

Aside from anything else marriage may have provided the young grand duchess, it enabled Marie to drop her title and the Romanov name, now considered indecent by the public.

A name is a promissory note that it cannot itself keep.

But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But

Chook's phone went to nine rings before she answered in the gritty rancor of interrupted sleep. But her voice changed when she recognized mine. "Trav! I phoned you last night. Who is that Mrs. Atkinson?

Who are you? What do you want? Who are you?" Her voice was light and fast and intense and her mouth trembled. She seemed to be on the narrow edge of emotional disaster, holding herself in check with the greatest effort. And about her was a rich and heavy scent of brandy, and an unsteadiness, the eyes too swift and not exactly in focus.

He's such a male little male.

The three unholy McGees—the one I try not to be, and the one I wish I was, and the one I really am.

God and your folks give you the face you're born with, but you earn the one you die with.

Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought.

you dont like the stars in Old Glory Then go back to your land across the sea To the land from which you came Whatever be its name

Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real.

Seek not thyself without thyself to find.

The whole notion of what is black and what is Southern is a thorny issue, to say the least.

Where does black food (Dunbar food, to use Ishmael Reed's term, which I prefer to 'soul food') stop and Southern food begin, or vice versa?

Wherever okra points its green tip, Africa has been: 'nuff said.