Quotes About Identity

the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn't seen from the outside but is still there.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human being.

She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm's voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. 'Don't give up! Don't you dare give up, Nora Seed!' She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers.

The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.

Wow. Really? You have yourself in quite high esteem there, Nora.' 'Shouldn't I? I mean, shouldn't everyone? What's wrong with self-esteem?

He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is –

Andrea told me after that film that there was too much Matt Haig in Matt Haig. She was kind of joking but kind of on to something. So for me, anything that lessens that extreme sense of selfe, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome. (...) Travel has been one of those things.

when you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.

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.

The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

I was convinced I wasn't made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn't made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres. So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn't yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.

Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn't matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree.

You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.

After all, we aren't just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.

When I am in a room with People," he wrote, "if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated.

If, as Schopenhauer said, "we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people," then love—at its best—is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

She went on Instagram and saw everyone had worked out how to live, except her.

A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it. I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

I click through her photos.

She tried to make herself look as presentable as it was possible to look in the two seconds before the arrival of a man she simultaneously slept with every night and also hadn't ever slept with. Schrödinger's husband, so to speak.

The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

C'è un solo cantuccio dell'universo che uno può esser certo di rendere migliore, e questo è il proprio io.

I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest.

And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers.