Quotes About Identity

It is like remembering two different lives at once...and wondering which of them is mine...

I came to realise that my life, which had seemed so unmistakably real, consisted only of memories

the feeling that I was becoming no one at all

Many millennials...feel "unsafe" if someone they disagree with speaks at an event they don't have to attend on their campus....they're trying to figure out what gender they are and which bathroom they should be using. It's not an improvement....Snowflakes may melt when the going gets tough, but kids who are taught good, conservative values will stand tall even when it's not easy.

Persons, bodies and minds inhabit language.

Racists will always call you a racist when you identify their racism. To love yourself now - is a form of racism. We are the only people who are criticized for loving ourselves. and white people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.

After the rise and decline of Greek civilisation and the Roman destruction of the city of Carthage, they made one area of the conquered territories into a province which they called Africa, a word derived from afri and the name of a group of people about whom little is known. At first the word applied only to the Roman colonies of North Africa. There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as the Land of the Burnt-face People.

Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal

My prevailing interest has been in the world as a whole, and in the place of a person in a larger setting than one defined by national boundaries.

It takes a long time for white guys to appreciate that they are breakable. They do not live from birth with the daily fear that they might be attacked or detained or killed. Their bodies are not constant targets of power. Their bodies are power, so they throw those bodies up and down mountains and stairs and out of airplanes and into pointless online yelling matches for fun. They just presume they will survive.

Jonathan is a musician and my best friend. I hope he does not read that last part. I would never call him my best friend to his face. I am from Massachusetts and he is from Connecticut, and New Englanders do not say things like that.

never underestimate the cool of your elders. They might be a kickass pair of lesbian superwomen who lived exactly the fuck the way they wanted to, even in what we now consider to be less enlightened times.

I am from Brookline, Massachusetts, but I was technically born in a hospital in Cambridge. So now you have a critical answer to many of my internet security questions. And as this book is about being honest with you for once, I will also tell you that my mother's maiden name was Callahan. Enjoy my Amazon Prime account and all my money.

He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.

For some people, status is what protects them from oblivion. And when they feel their status is slipping away from them, they act fearfully, irrationally.

All men, I think, wonder who the secret man that lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. They wonder if that man is better than the one they know. If that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, if that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness.

Philadelphia is called "The City of Brotherly Love," which is a lie. Philadelphia is not a nice city.

A whole world of horror is contained in the process of definition.

We are the only creators, the only gods. Guilty gods, negated gods, damaged, schizophrenic gods, but above all self- changing gods.

Identification is domination.

The rule of identity is the rule of amnesia.

Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life. Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally.

Representation involves definition, exclusion, separation.