Quotes About Identity

My wife is a wonderful woman," he said in a kind of peroration. "Most wonderful woman. Ought to of been a man. If she was a man I wouldn't of married her." He laughed a long time over that and repeated it three or four times and resolved to remember it so he could tell it to a lot of other people.

Grampa an' the old place, they was jus' the same thing.

Je sens que je suis un homme, et l'homme est une chose très importante, peut être plus importante qu'une étoile

My father made a mold and forced me into it," Adam said. "I was a bad casting but I couldn't be remelted. Nobody can be remelted. And so I remained a bad casting

You're pretty full of yourself. You're marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask—Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose kid—mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside of that you're very like all the other snot-nose kids.

Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

tone. "All right," she said, "but how do I go about being a boy?

when people have heard of you, favorably or not, they change; they become, through shyness or the other qualities that publicity inspires, something they are not under ordinary circumstances

You know pretty well that I don't think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can't reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates.

He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it.

I thought that if we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it.

Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good. And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it? I guess so. Maybe that's it.

Hayatlar?m?z bizden ayr?l?nca nas?l yaÅŸayabiliriz? GeçmiÅŸimiz olmadan kendimizi nas?l tan?yaca??z? Hay?r, hay?r. B?rak kals?n. Yak gitsin.

Because they were not hurt or insulted, they were not defensive or combative. Because their dignity was intact, they had no need to be overbearing, and because the Cooper boys had never heard that they were inferior, their minds could grow to their true limits.

Can you imagine? said Adam. 'He'll know so many new things. I wonder if he'll talk different. You know, Lee, in the East a boy takes on the speech of his school. You can tell a Harvard man from a Princeton man. At least that's what they say.' 'I'll listen,' said Lee. 'I wonder what dialect they speak at Stanford.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American

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. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We continually move backward and forward in time as we use our stories to describe who we were, who we are, and what we hope we will become. Storytelling

Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? . . . Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!2 Bonhoeffer's question "Who am I?

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.

Nobody belongs to us, except in memory." (Grandparenting [1994])

Do you realize there isn't a Gentile character in here who isn't slavishly in love with some Jew?