Quotes About Identity

And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

Your twenties were a time when you still felt young, but the groundwork was being laid in a serious way, crisscrossing beneath the surface. It was being laid even while you slept. What you did, where you lived, who you loved, all of it was like pieces of track being put down in the middle of the night by stealth workers.

What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?" "Be a man, I guess," Ethan said...

You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is.

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.

From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived ," said Ethan, "because we are just so fucking compelling , our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.

Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact.

Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

If you ever wanted to get an accurate picture of who you are, Greer thought years later, all you had to do was look at everything you'd Googled over the past twenty-four hours. Most people would be appalled to see themselves with this kind of clarity.

She became who she had been meant to be

And it was true that if you categorized people by which Disney character they were, then Jonah would always be Bambi. Motherless, graceful, unobtrusive. Ethan--Jiminy Cricket, the annoying little conscience... just look at Ash. In the Disney hierarchy she was Snow White... He paused to wonder which Disney character Jules was, and realized that Disney did not make women or girls or woodland animals that were like her.

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was.

My job does not define me.

The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was visible and imaginable.

To keep people from the particulars of your life kept you from being seen as one thing or another, and so it was possible you could be thought of as anything, or even as everything.

Their hands were on each other—on Zee with her curated boyish look and Noelle with her carefully feminine look that was slightly tempered by the nearly shaved head and prominent hipbones and the careful comportment, giving her the quality of one of those artist's mannequins. The arms and leges could be rearranged any way you liked, link by link, and this was what sex was too, when power was fluid. You could rearrange the other person, and the could rearrange you.

Does that scare you? Are you afraid that if I take away the mysterious part of you, I won't like you anymore?