Quotes About Identity

I rarely said "I have depression" or "I am currently experiencing depression", because I imagined that depression was the sum of who I was... the trouble is, that I had a very binary view of things. I thought that you were either well or ill, sane or insane.

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be

Nu-ti irosi viata facandu-ti griji pentru lucrurile pe care le ratezi. N-as vrea sa sune ca o insemnare budista - desi, de acord, e oarecum budista-, dar viata nu e despre a fi fericit cu ceea ce faci, ci despre a fi fericit cu ceea ce esti.

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what did not. -Camus

we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.

But she'll be there in the bathroom and she won't know how she got there.' 'And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did?

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life.

I looked around at all the certificates on the wall and felt thankful to come from a place where personal success was meaningless.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

A quote I heard recently: "Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.

I am not sure I have ever met someone like you," I said. "That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?

She liked this life – or more precisely, she liked the version of herself in this life.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

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. The regrets which were on permanent repeat in her mind.

She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.

It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn't even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have purpose.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do?

every day a retreat from who she'd imagined she'd be.

After all, we aren't just who we are born. We are who we become.

Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveller. Glaciologist. Happy. Loved. Nothing.

Even death was something Nora couldn't do properly. It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

A human being is complete just being human. We are our own destination.

S)he no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or parter or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.