Quotes About Identity

Different is liberating. Who the hell would want to be the same as everyone else?

I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot.

Why do I always have to be the hero?

I wonder if as the bizarre becomes commonplace there is a hidden cost to the self.

Holiness is not a bid to be noticed or loved or accepted by God. Holiness, rather, is acting out and acting upon the truth that God has noticed, loved and accepted us long before we did anything to warrant that.

From time to time,' Turner explained, most people seek to discard their customary clothing and status markers and 'don the liberating masks of a liminal masquerade.

As a father, you immediately become uncool, especially the older they get. The older you get, it's inevitable that, as cool as you think you are, you're probably just as lame in your kids' eyes.

Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it seizes to be a culture at all.

These local yokels couldn't find their own asses if you tattooed their names on each cheek.

If I was controlled by anything, it was my perception of who I was.

was the sum of my experiences. I was my own person. I was who I needed to be, not what someone else wanted me to be.

Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.

When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapability poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear.

Isn't that it, to be yourself and somehow, to belong?

We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.

In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.

I didn't judge; it was as if that were part of my purpose: I wanted to know the men who moved through my nights like passing comets, wanted them to feel the pleasure of being known.

Those lists of men in Whitman's papers--a collector's catalog, a record of the body's travels? How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?

Judy, of course, doesn't stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage.

Where does passionate interest come from? My personal view is that it comes from the deepest level of our being—at the level of our true identity. It comes from the part of us that exists beyond the characteristics and personality traits we acquire as a result of our social upbringing.

would say that many, if not most people, grow up in a family and cultural environment that gives little, if any, objective, nonjudgmental support to the unique ways in which we feel compelled to express ourselves

Taking responsibility means acknowledging and accepting, at the deepest part of your identity, that you—not the market—are completely responsible for your success or failure as a trader.

Are you letting culture, not scripture, determine your sexuality, how you date, how you present yourself, how you engage in certain relationships with members of the opposite sex? We need to be very clear that the way we do life is different than the rest of the world.

Our identity is not in our joy, and our identity is not in our suffering. Our identity is in Christ, whether we have joy or are suffering.