Quotes About Identity

I made sure we fucked whenever the conversations got too emotional or too long - we weren't lesbians, after all.

You can scream you're Indian, you can disavow your religion, you can even be the next incarnation of Krishna for all your Hindu countrymen will care. Their HRM will pull down your pants and check your foreskin and slaughter you just the same.

To think I need a gun to protect against those who'd kill me for being Muslim ... It's too bad they don't know about my true religion of noodling - a reason to get their nuts in a snit.

What are you now, Jaz Bond? Double-oh-Six, the chhakka secret agent?

As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wearing western clothes find themselves in a dilemma. If they focus on integration, convenience and conformity they have to sacrifice habit, style and self-perception.

The immigrant who comes as a wife has a more difficult time. If work exists for her, it is in the future and after much finding of feet. At present all she is, is a wife, and a wife is alone for many, many hours. There will come a day when even books are powerless to distract. When the house and its conveniences can no longer completely charm or compensate. Then she realizes she is an immigrant for life.

Perhaps that was the ultimate immigrant experience. Not that any one thing was steady enough to attach yourself to for the rest of your life, but that you found different ways to belong, ways not necessarily lasting, but ones that made your journey less lonely for a while. When something failed it was a signal to move on. For an immigrant there was no going back.

Hegel further believed that all things owe their existence to their opposites and that all opposites are actually identical.

The defense mechanisms of The Imposter are: sarcasm, name-dropping, self-righteousness, the need to impress others and the need for others' approval.

Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New Britannia, the Millennial Eden, or the new demesne for Mammon to infest.

we have to be aware of the power and importance of organizing not just around identity, but the materiality of daily life, which still, in many respects, is racialized for people of color. You build from that, but you have a grander social vision that transcends it and recognizes the strengths and limitations that are drawn from the particularity of identity.

Some people just use beautiful things to just shop or to have a tribal feeling - 'Oh, blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Hermes blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Saint Laurent blah-blah blah' - because it's like a need, a tribe, recognition: 'Ahh, my Rolex.' But I run away from anything which is too recognizable - it's my nature.

India was free... broken in parts... bruised, but free. There was an essential unity to India that no partition could destroy.

They had nationalities even: Thai eggplant, Chinese eggplant, Italian eggplant. The United Nations of eggplants terrified me because I knew the oblong purple vegetable as baingan, brinjal in English, and I could cook it in five different ways. Would this exotic brinjal still yield to my hands?

In Manhattan, brown men were either cab drivers or Wall Street bankers, immigrants or expatriates, the gulf between them as wide as a skyscraper was tall.

Aren't Hindu, Sikh, Mussalman, Isai, Parsee like the spices in Panjab's masala box? Assorted?

The Mahabharata is our story, but in this modern version - our Shakuni has an English avatar.

Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs were not separate nations - they were Panjabis who had lived for years on the land, enjoying each other's festivities or ignoring them, but co-existing nonetheless.

Bapu could not bear the thought of India being partitioned, but the bitter truth was that in the hearts of Indians, lines were already drawn.

The world hat day appeared perfect. Like a great wrong had been righted. India had shrugged off her shackles and had stood upright, ready to claim her rightful position o the world stage.

Ana el haq! Io sono la verità!

Redheaded people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there.

I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.

Raum ist der Ausdruck der Gesellschaft.