Quotes About Identity

Something else that puzzles me about other people is that a lot of them don't know their purpose in life. This usually does bother them—more than not being able to remember being born, anyway—but I can't even imagine it. Part of knowing who I am is knowing why I am, and I've always known who I am, from the first moment.

The pride of the hipster food movement is sort of annoying, but it fascinates me.

I was a lapsing Christian, but in what direction was I lapsing? To nowhere, to nothingness. As absurd as the church was, it was an improvement over my actual life because there was at least a pretense of meaning there. Back in New York, I was just eating and taking up space, a depraved postmodern creature on the job, carrying pebbles up the media anthill.

It's not easy for any security official to find a journalist with the intelligence, integrity, and wherewithal to successfully protect their identities. When an official finds a reporter who's proved he or she will not burn them by running off-the-record disclosures, the official will tend to want to protect that relationship. The official therefore will not knowingly dump a big steaming pile on that reporter's lap.

I wrote a book under a pen name, Bic.

Whereas the studies that preceded it focused on poor rural whites, who may or may not have been of mixed racial descent, Mongrel Virginians concerned itself with a small mixed-population group in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of western Virginia that Estabrook dubbed the Win (White-Indian-Negro) tribe.

Sometimes she feels like a third gender- preferring primary colors to pastels, the radio to singing. At least she's all mermaid: never gets tired of swimming, hates the thought of socks. -from "The Straight Forward Mermaid

For people who undergo religious conversions, individuality is replaced by ideology, and very little room is left for personal growth or expression.

Twice in a year and a half, I had undergone two complete transformations of my so-called self. First, my conscious self was transformed into something other than it previously had been by psychedelic drugs. Then, a year and a half later, my original self was restored, this time by a drug known as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI).

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

This truth--to prove, and make thine own: Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Is there no life, but these alone? Madman or slave, must man be one?

There is s no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities. We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house. Theodore Roosevelt

sometimes it pays to be the only normal one in a town of vampires. I'm practically invisible.

Who we thought we were dies when a beloved dies. And it takes a while for a new self to rise, often haltingly, from the ashes of our ravaged hearts.

The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.

We become the stories we listen to. But perhaps the more important question is, what stories do you listen to? What stories are forming your life?

we are much more interested in developing self-expression than we are in developing selves that are worth expressing. Personal preference has triumphed over the pursuit of excellence.

When we pretend to be somoene other than who we are, our true self hides in fear and shame; the fear of being discovered and the shame of not being enough.

You are not what happened to you.

There are some questions that we all ask ourselves in different ways: Who am I? Who is God? What am I here for? What matters most? What matters least? What are my unique talents and abilities? What will my contribution be? What happens when we die?

We become what we celebrate. It is true not only of the life of a person but also of the life of a family. It is true of the life of a nation, and it is true of the life of the Church.

If we are to be happy, it will be as ourselves.