Quotes About Identity

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

So, if and when they discover aliens they'd be really pretty unsettled because then we'd have to know, once and for all, that there is nothing really unique or special about us at all.

Then there are other serious psychological concerns. To be constantly presenting ourselves, and packaging ourselves, like potatoes pretending to be chips. To be constantly seeing everyone else looking their best, doing fun things that we are not doing.

he belonged to a special subcategory of human called a "teenager," the chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal.

You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Se você tem como objetivo ser algo que não é, vai sempre fracassar. Tenha como objetivo ser você. Parecer, agir e pensar como você. Ser a versão mais verdadeira de si. Abrace essa singularidade. Apoie, ame, trabalhe arduamente essa singularidade. E não dê a menor bola quando as pessoas ridicularizarem ou zombarem dela. A maioria das fofocas é inveja disfarçada. Mantenha a cabeça baixa, mantenha a estamina. Continue a nadar...

Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else.

It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

You don't become a good person by believing you are a bad one.

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.

Parecía que ni siquiera morir se le daba bien a Nora. Era una sensación familiar, la de sentirse incompleta en casi todos los sentidos posibles. Un rompecabezas humano sin terminar. Una vida inconclusa y una muerte inconclusa también

What we are and what we mean are different things. It's fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.

I suppose 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.

Trató de imaginarse cómo habría sido aceptarse a sí misma completamente. Todos los errores que habían quedado en su cuerpo. Todos los sueños que no había cumplido y todos los dolores que había sentido. Todos los deseos y anhelos reprimidos

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 everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to "beef," which is the monosyllable furthest away from "cow," because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.

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".

seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.

this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

I was named after Bob Dylan. Did I ever tell you that?

You have no control over who people think you are. So don't worry.

So what, you have a label? "Depressive." Everyone would have a label if they asked the right professional.