Quotes About Identity

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called - to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.

I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism--it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win

I'm just a woman with a penis! she would say, her voice rising.

The point was - he wasn't acting . It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.

You are my work of art, Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you, Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

In every life," Dolores had said, "I think there's always a moment when you must decide where you belong.

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.

Remember, Duncan asked on the plane, how Walt asked if it was green or brown? Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged—like a man who had never felt at home, but who'd suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.

one of the more sophisticated and accepting things about Europe, when it came to difficult decisions regarding sexual identity, was that the Europeans were so used to sexual differences that they had already begun to make fun of them.

For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.

It's hard to pretend to be born without causing offense.

Some readers and writers don't look like readers or writers.

We tend to think that if you don't know where you're goin, you don't belong where you are.

Most of you know who I am, he whispered. Duncan was sleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand. Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

Good night you Kings of New England. You Princes of Maine. Who knows what book this quote comes from?

You're not like anyone else, Billy - that's what's the matter with you, Donna said.

In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say 'top' and 'bottom' - we said 'pitcher' and 'catcher'...

Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn't know was where she was in her own story.