Quotes About Identity

Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world.

Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.

Variant selves haunt the corridors of my brain, people my novels, crowd in like ghosts drawn to blood when friends or strangers tell me secrets, hand me their troubles, sweaters knit of hair and wire.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

A smile becomes you or perhaps you become you when you smile.

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.

Todo viaje hombre adentro tiene su contrapartida, es decir, el viaje mujer afuera.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures

There was a girl, once upon a time and in your time. She embraced her life up to a point, then rejected it, and from that rejection have come all her difficulties.

I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.

I catch myself thinking that I'm not physically visible, that whoever I'm talking to is responding to my personality, not my person.

Nadinola Bleaching Cream: "Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?

What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.

If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon… White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

too, rolled and

We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.