Quotes About Identity

He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotiomal level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials. This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.

Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the "good white leading the poor black out of the jungle." Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to "bringing them up to our level," without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be.

In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "accident" - rather than by who he is in his humanity.

A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called "black separatists" were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture"—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other

We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

Night coming tenderly Black like me.

I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me.

Phew!" His small blue eyes shone with repugnance, a look of such unreasoning contempt for my skin that it filled me with despair. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation - not of myself but of all men who were black like me.

I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore.

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

My dear boy, Miss Frost said sharply. My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

In this world," Franny once observed, "just as you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

We don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?