Quotes About Identity

Lo conoces? ?dijo Reg. ?No. Me he equivocado. ?Yo diría que es un marica total.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.

Maud Wainwright, a big, irregularly handsome woman, probably fifty and not ashamed of it

Like many women my age, I am 28 years old.

You can figure out who you were by which movies you loved when.

Unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. —Isaac Bashevis Singer

Each of us shines in a different way, but this doesn't make our light less bright. —Albert Einstein

To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.

I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.

I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.

When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.

Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.

I'm sick. It's true. It isn't going to go away. All my life, I've thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I've always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I'd be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else.

The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.

Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.

And then the horror sets in. All that time I wasn't crazy; I was, in fact, crazy. It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. I'm sick. It's true. It isn't going to go away. All my life, I've thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I've always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I'd be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone