Quotes About Identity

You don't need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the "being" not the "doing.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become. And there really were quite a lot of things she hadn't become.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.

Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

Happiness occurs when you for get who you're expected to be. And what you're expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self acceptance. It's the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.

I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I'd been a Cure fan, for God's sake.

Loneliness isn't an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost. But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier than being with people who aren't on your wavelength. The cure for loneliness isn't more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.

You are right to think of these lives like a piano where you're playing tunes that aren't really you. You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn't. You are forgetting your regrets.

I'm French. I mean, that's my subject. Was also my nationality, too, though who lets nationality define them? Apart from idiots.

I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.

We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say "I am in pain," there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.

Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she'd imagined she'd be.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to 'someone is looking for something'.

It's such a weird thing for young people to look at distorted images of things they should be.' —Daisy Ridley, on why she quit Instagram

You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.

Words – spoken or written – are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.

The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbles hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.