Quotes About Identity

I learned very early to choose my lines carefully. I still have a terrible habit, when people pause too long between words, of feeding them their line. I know my lines in advance. I dress for occasions, for personae. There are women in my closet, hanging on my 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.

There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future

I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.

I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where "thinness" was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace

If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.

The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?

I have a word. Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it's a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn't merely an utter failure on my part, if it's a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cure.

They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.

We deserve more. Vastly more. Sufficiency, plenty, abundance. Not the denial of body that is no more than a metaphor for our denial of self.

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

Isn't it strange, Dez, that we never see certain parts of ourselves? Our backs, our lungs, our hearts. We never know what it really is to sit across from ourselves.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.

Sometimes you sit around Don't know what to do, don't know where you're going to All you have to be is you What else can you do.

I tried to be what you wanted me to be But you didn't want a girl you wanted MACHINE ... I can't be part of this machine I got too much heart to keep it in I can't be part of your machine I promise this is not the end

The complete answer is not in these pages, but there's enough to get you started, Mary. You're bright, sensitive, intense, and driven. That's who you are,

To fully express the true self is at best a calculated risk.

For them, health, or well-being, is more than getting by, existing, or making do. Knowing thyself means puzzling out how identity and fulfillment, meaning and destiny, are inextricably linked.

because often the counterpart to high potential is feeling trapped and unsure while not knowing why.