Quotes About Identity

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.    The

Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner's shirt a few inches, like I'm shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I'm not afraid, and that I'm not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I'm not anything. least of all what I am.

Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellular level, in the blood.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl's debut.

My mom always says, you don't have a self until you have a secret.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.

Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he'd sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985 Playboy he'd found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform.

the bad things you do become part of you, literally.

Its not that they want her. It's just they have this feeling, and they're off, Billy, they're way off, but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she's more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precint house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs…

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love—" "—I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly. "But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever.

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Don't you wonder what happened, Goldie?" "What happened to what?" "To our family. Aunt Florence just told me that she and my mother were close. Like twins, she said.

Remember who you are, May." The balm of my mother's oft-repeated words and the softness of memory banished my unease. I flew down the stairs to the party.

Remember who you are." "The Sullivans have stolen from me, and I want back what's mine.

I did not know how to say that, nor how to tell Goldie that I had not lived the life she obviously thought I had.

People see what they want to see. They're busy trying to figure out who Bandersnitch is, but what they don't expect is someone who looks like me, so no one sees me, even when I'm right in front of them. I'm hiding in plain sight. I stay in the background mostly. It's a damnable thing, but it works. You were surprised at who I was, remember. I wasn't as you imagined me.

I'm still trying to figure out where you belong." "What is there to wonder about? I'm one of the Sporting set. You said it yourself.

music told me that whatever else had been taken from me, my soul remained.

Joseph wore uncertainty poorly; it seemed to somehow misshape him. I heard in it everything he hid from the world, his own sense of worthlessness, the fear behind his ego.