Quotes About Identity

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it's so like me.

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Le véritable lieu de naissance est celui où l'on a porté pour la première fois un coup d'oeil intelligent sur soi-même: mes premières patries ont été des livres.

Maybe it only hurt so much because my body was in a solid state . . . I always tried to keep up appearances, and yet at the same time the thing I really wanted, the one thing I truly desired, was my liquefaction.

I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible Look on me and be renewed

I don't know," she said. "I'm not sure you would like me in real life. I'm a lot different there, you know. I don't even look the same." " I don't care if you look like a troll with warts," Sir Leo declared, taking her hand in his. "I love you.

I can't go on saving the world if it means neglecting my duties as a cheerleader.

For the record, I would have made a very lousy romance heroine.

I would have made a very crappy book heroine.

Lacan is concerned with lack as the ontological underpinning of human existence.

On this view, it is not only how we die—or face the prospect of our mortality, as phenomenologists like to say—but also how we inhabit language that singularizes us, that gives our identities a distinctive resonance.

It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as "boundary-creating" experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.

As Luce Iri- garay explains, "What makes me one, and perhaps even unique, is the fact that you are and I am not you.

What we most care about in the world—and particularly what we cannot help caring about on the unconscious level—influences our fate by shaping us into the sorts of persons we are.

On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life.

The older I get, the more I realize that what other people think about me has little to do with who I am. All of us – Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, even the godless – will always be seen by others through their personal spectacles of perception.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

History calls them a defeated people, but the Metis do not feel defeated, and that is what is important. Today, as in the old days, they play their fiddles, sing, dance, and tell their children the old stories. They work hard, as they have always done. They do not mind when they are called Metis, halfbreeds, mixed bloods, Canadians or bois-brules. They know who they are: 'Ka tip aim soot chic' -- the people who own themselves" (40).

We are made of awkward.

I need to get onto Aza's ship. I know where it's going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I've really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.

Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be.

You are strong enough to sing as you wish, not as your pain has forced to. You aren't your hurt. You're other than that. You are not the broken things you've been.