Quotes About Identity

The chubby white suburban teenagers impersonating cops were precisely the kind of men to whom we would have preferred not to unload this story.

we fuck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often.

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.

You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking?

The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like.

She cannot imagine how it might be, to see him again. He would be a child and she is now grown, almost a woman. What would he think? Would he recognise her now, if he were to pass her in the street, this boy who will for ever remain a boy? Several

and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed?

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

This is a different man, surely, from the one who ordered Contrari's death. It cannot have been him. This is her husband, who loves her, or seems to; that was the ruler of Ferrara. They are the same man, they are different men, the same yet different.

How can they not have invited him to this meeting? He used to have influence – he used to rule over them all. He used to be someone.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.

He takes them in his hands; he meets their steady gazes; he looks into their identical eyes; he arranges them, head to foot, upon his knee; he watches as one takes the thumb of the other into its mouth and sucks upon it; he sees that the pair have led a life together that began before anything else. He touches their heads with both of his palms. You, he says, and you.

Aged sixteen, is what she sees first. Then: Insists on keeping her hair long. Iris reads the whole document from beginning to end, then goes back and reads it again. It ends with: Parents report finding her dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother's clothes.

Esme picks up woollen combinations and asks where they go in the baffling order of things. The shopgirl looks at their grandmother who shakes her head. 'They are from the colonies,' she says.

They call to one another in their particular argot: pure Home Counties cut with Teen American. A lot of yips, heys, elongated vowels. They swing bags through the air. Hair is flicked, stroked, tossed. Trousers are worn tight but low; shoes unlaced. The females link arms with their chosen peers; the males perform mock violence upon those they recognize as their tribe.

My wife who, just a moment ago, was a dark, forbidding figure with a gun, a long gray coat, and a hat like Death's hood, she has shucked off the sou'wester and transmogrified back to her usual incarnation.

Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we're not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn't know this?

we were both trying to see the people we had been, those ghost selves who no longer existed, those able-bodied bipeds who never thought twice about the miracle of independent movement, who had been swallowed inside the sessile, atrophied beings we now were. I

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We bein in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

I think about the person I was in my mid 20's. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.