Quotes About Identity

Black Power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it.

You've got to be really dialed into exactly who you are to the one hundredth power or you're just everyone else.

As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?

We all know the power of film; we all know there's almost nothing more powerful than to see people on film that look and talk like you, like we do.

Nationality is the creative power of human culture, culture is the creative power of nationality.

But, on another level it's really sort of this really cool coming of age story, it reminds me of like The Breakfast Club or something like that, if I can be so bold to associate with The Breakfast Club.

Many Canadian nationalists harbour the bizarre fear that should we ever reject royalty, we would instantly mutate into Americans, as though the Canadian sense of self is so frail and delicate a bud, that the only thing stopping it from being swallowed whole by the US is an English lady in a funny hat.

The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.

The grander the name, the blander the dame.

If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel.

I have changed this world. I have found my place. The world is different because I was in it. This is what we should all want.

I think of the internet like my disguise. It's the only place where people don't treat me like I'm either a monster or a charity case to be pitied.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him "father."

There is a fine breed for you, Irish-Indian. My family crest would be a Shillalah with a Tomahawk on one end.

What are you reading? isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?

A father and his son are in a terrible car crash. The father is killed instantly—but the son survives, barely, his life hanging in the balance. He's rushed to the hospital and into surgery, but there's only one doctor there, and as soon as the doctor sees the boy, the doctor says, 'I can't operate on my own son!' How could this be, if the boy's father was killed in the crash?

Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,

The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith

Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind,

had my hair permed down the center but cut shorter on the sides, in a recent fit of enthusiasm for the artist who was still then known as Prince and also for the look of a singer named Adam Ant. Despite my stylist's valiant efforts, my hair looked nothing like theirs. But I did look like someone trying very hard not to look like everyone else; I was elaborately disguised as someone who didn't care what other people thought of me.

When we ask one another "What are you reading?" sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. "What are you reading?" isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, "Who are you now and who are you becoming?

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter...