Quotes About Identity

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

I was born like this. I came out of the womb saying, 'I'm worried that something's wrong with me. There's this weird growth between my legs!

I like being a girl. I just want to be the one who says what that means.

Walking into someone's house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.

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.

Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

Girls weren't weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time.

Because of course everyone was so soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

The voice. It doesn't just matter what you say. It matters who does the saying. It matters whose voice it is.

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there - your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were - both exhausted and frightened Greer.

When you have a child, it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child get pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit.

Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention.

But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. 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. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself

What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.

illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: "Hello there, I'm Frankincense. Well, technically I'm Frankincense's monster, but everyone gets that wrong." One

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary

Most of the time I'm like, 'Why do I have to share a gender with you, you piece of shit?' It's like when you have a bad relative who has the same last name.

The two Lucys are going to go to the movies with Eli and I," Robby said, "Great. And you have English teachers for parents.

The human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

The Kadetskys were atheists—"lowercase a," her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.

there are two aspects to feminism. The first is individualism, which is that I get to shape my own life. That I don't have to fit into a stereotype, doing what my mother tells me, conforming to someone else's idea of what a woman is. But there's a second aspect too, and here I want to use the old-fashioned word 'sisterhood,' which may make you groan a little and head for the exits in a stampede, but I'll just have to take that chance.

Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

We're all the same under our skin, aren't we? We're all wanting things we don't understand. Things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.