Quotes About Identity

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.

But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated instance of the countless mistakes, more trivial, more pointed, unintentional, or deliberate, that accompany our names on the particular index card the world allots us.

His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

But we do not like to show off to them relations who have remained what we have tried hard to cease from being.

Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save as we learn things that happened before we were born — from the accounts given me by other people.

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

the lie that tries to have us believe we are not inescapably alone in the world, and which, when we converse with someone, prevents us from admitting that it is not we who are speaking, that at such times we try to take on the semblance of other people, rather than be the self that differs from them.

C'est peut-être de la même manière qu'une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être, et greffée au cœur d'un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie, même quand l'être d'où elle avait été détachée a péri.

Benim nazar?mda bir hiç oldu?unu zannetti?im ?ey, demek ki asl?nda bütün hayat?m, her ?eyimdi. ?nsan kendini ne kadar az tan?yor!

O que chamamos nossa conduta permanece ignorado de nosso mais próximo vizinho; o que esquecemos haver dito, ou que até nunca dissemos, vai provocar hilaridade até num outro planeta, e a imagem que os outros formam de nossos gestos e atitudes tampouco se parece com a que nós próprios formamos, como um desenho, um decalque malfeito, e onde ora a um traço negro corresponde um espaço vazio, e a um branco, um contorno inexplicável.

In so many people there are different strata which are not alike (there were in her her father's character, and her mother's); we traverse first one, then the other. But, next day, their order is reversed. And finally we do not know who is going to allot the parts, to whom we are to appeal for a hearing. Gilberte was like one of those countries with which we dare not form an alliance because of their too frequent changes of government.

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge se stesso.

Thus I who from infancy, had lived from day to day, with a sort of fixed idea of myself derived from others as well as myself, perceived for the first time, after witnessing the metamorphosis of all these people, that the time which had gone by for them, had gone by for me also and this revelation threw me into consternation.

every time that she indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as, ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil's works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world.

I shall see myself that Morel is mine." This unmistakeableness in the eyes of everyone, in his own eyes, made M. de Charlus happiest of all. For the possession of what one loves is a joy greater than love itself.

chaque classe sociale a sa pathologie)

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

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Hélas! Albertine était plusieurs personnes.

Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d'Éporcheville's features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.

But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.

Every time we are assailed by images of women very different from ourselves, unless these images are eliminated by being forgotten or overlaid by others, we can have no peace of mind until we have converted these strangers into something more like us, the self in that respect being similar in its action and reactions to the physical organism, which is incapable of accepting a foreign body within itself without immediately setting to work to digest and assimilate the intruder.