Quotes About Identity

You'd better leave your chromosomes at the door.

It's not the tattoos, my dear boy," Jack's father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William's hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren't an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. "It's everything I truly heard and felt—it's everything I ever loved! It's not the tattoos that marked me.

We all go through a phase—it lasts a lifetime, for some of us—when we're embarrassed by our parents; we don't want them hanging around us because we're afraid they'll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.

When somebody touches you...and you really don't wanna be touched, that's not really being touched. You still got you inside of you. And nobody has touched you. Not really. You still got you inside of you. You believe that.

My mother named me Adam, like you-know-who.

Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;

En este mundo de cochina mentalidad", piensa Jenny, "eres la esposa de alguien o la puta de alguien; o vas camino de convertirte en una de las dos cosas. Si no encajas en ninguna de las dos categorías, todo el mundo trata de hacerte creer que algo te pasa.

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

What we believe as children forms us; what haunts us in our childhood and adolescence can make us do wayward things

Adam, we can't make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are—we can only do what we do, sweetie.

Caroline O'Day appealed to us, although the breasts of Caroline O'Day were devalued, in Owen's view, by her Catholicism.

I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.

That poor girl wasn't a girl," Señor Eduardo said; he'd glanced once at Lupe, asleep in his lap, just to be sure she was still sleeping. "That poor girl was Flor

Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar; she knew he was dying. He had just one vowel and one consonant left.

In this dirty-minded world," Jenny thinks, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.

No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?

He wanted to leave, but now it was his fate that held him. Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling: Wilbur Larch felt himself called.

though there was nothing wrong with Garp's hands – they just seemed to be clumsy at masturbation. 'Garp!

Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. And Garp would give her this: Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

She was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. 'In this world,' Franny once observed, 'just when you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they've met you.

If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever. "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.

I remember you as a little boy," she told me, not long ago, "but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself.

The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was—not only as a novelist.

it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.