Quotes About Identity

I say every dog looks like no other but that isn't true. Not entirely. Difference is slippery.

Little idiosyncratic expressions can form A sense of who one is. Who one was. One can, hypothetically, be brought back In the form of an actor Who gives an after the fact replication Of text conveyed in a character's voice. I can no more understand the world as a stage Of myself, mired as I am, In this missing.

Gentlemen do not work. Since I do not work, therefore I must be a gentleman.

I've been called many things in my life, but never a sacrificial penguin.

told me, a lord, no less.

Mikhal - "...most of all, I want to be the man that I am only when I am with you

But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

You don't have to be Southern to have good manners. And you don't have to be a Yankee to make a total ass of yourself.

It made perfect sense to me. My whole life I'd gone along with somebody else's plans. Not wanting to rock the boat and put myself first. After all, most of the time I didn't know what my own plans were. But the need for my own dream was screaming to get out of me.

So many women just don't know how great they really are. They come to us all vogue outside and vague on the inside.

While clothes may not make the woman, they certainly have a strong effect on her self-confidence, which, I believe, does make the woman.

It takes twenty or so years before a mother can know with any certainty how effective her theories have been--and even then there are surprises. The daily newspapers raise the most frightening questions of all for a mother of sons: Could my once sweet babes ever become violent men? Are my sons really who I think they are?

Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him; a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hoardes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he'd ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?

In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man's name, who bears the man's children—who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.

Had I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world - on some part of it. But I am a woman, and God, or the Devil, or Fate, or whosoever it was, has flayed me of the thick outer skin and thrown me out into the midst of Life - has left me a lonely damned thing filled with the red, red blood of ambition and desire, but afraid to be touched, for there is no thick skin between my sensitive flesh and the and world s fingers. But I want to be touched.

I have the personality, the nature, of Napoleon, albeit a feminine translation.

Often we lose our identity trying to please or placate others.

Do not copy me," [Antoine] Bourdelle repeatedly told his students. "Sing your own song.

Raising a child, managing a household, and being a good wife, all the while focusing on expressing herself in ways that had never been done before, took an enormous toll on Morisot