Quotes About Identity

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a work of man.

We are the hero of our own story.

In violence we forget who we are.

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.

For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.

The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.

It made me love them more because I knew the day would come when I would also be unrecognizable to myself.

There were so many things I wasn't that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

the many things that puzzled me was, if there were other Black people as proud and fierce-looking as Effie and could control a situation as well as she could, why was the Black race in such a mess? I didn't even think that Effie could answer that question

We ended up in America by default, so it'll never really be our home.

It's so awful and sad," she once admitted to Tom Goodenough, "to belong to a race that no sane person believes in.

So maybe my own life is not so drastic and dreadful...maybe I am just like all those other girls who have come before me with their oily T-zones and random terrible days and bittersweet triumphs, the world billowing out behind them.

She once read during emotional duress a person's body and soul could actually part. That a person could quite literally be beside herself.

I know it's wrong to generalize, but some cultures encourage certain traits, and the ones the iMozani'i culture promotes are ones I happen to like, so I felt right at home from the word go.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

They were proud of their nationality, which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line of heroes reaching back to Rurik.

The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the royal line of human descent, the Aryan;

Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretence of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.

People who have earned no pride in themselves, are content to be proud of their cities through other men.

Se le ocurrió que nadie sino él miraría nunca desde sus ojos, que de entre todas las vidas en que podía haber vivido, más numerosas que lo imaginable, esta era la suya, clavada en este único punto del infinito; el resto siempre sería ajeno, él sería yo.