Quotes About Identity

Everyone has to be an orphan some time.

Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.

Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary-do you hear? Who are you in there?

Thou art a peanut.

It's hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.

Aron said slowly. "I wouldn't want to know that. I'd like to know why you do it. You're always at something. I just wonder why you do it. I wonder what's it good for." A pain pierced Cal's heart. His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him. He knew that his brother had found him out. And he felt a longing for Aron to love him. He felt lost and hungry and he didn't know what to do.

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eves the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

I guess this personal hide-and-seek is not unusual. And some people are 'it' all their lives - hopelessly 'it.

What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you're trying to identify?Are you looking at little things to avoid big things?

I was afraid I had you in me. No, I haven't. I'm my own. I don't have to be you. I just know. It just came to me whole. If I'm mean, it's my own mean.

Her self was an island.

You don't seem like the same man." "I'm not. Maybe nobody is, for long.

I was told that since my photograph was as widely distributed as my publisher could make it, I would find it impossible to move about without being recognized. Let me say in advance that in over ten thousand miles, in thirty-four states, I was not recognized even once.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco "the City". Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is "city". Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197

Do you think I'm a child? she asked. Not any more, said Adam, I'm beginning to think you're a twisted human--or no human at all.

Your sons have no names." Adam replied, "Their mother left them motherless." "And you have left them fatherless. Can't you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don't you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?" "I didn't do it," Adam said. "Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? [...] How if you wake up in the night and know -and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

I think perhaps I am one of those lucky mortals whose work and whose life are the same thing.

She stepped around in front of him and stopped him. "You look here, mister. You kiss me now." "Why?" She said slowly, "So everybody will know that I'm Mrs. Lettuce-head.