Quotes About Identity

This confirms it: I am living with Beavis and sluthead.

Those were the best times, when I was still all promise and potential. Because right now I'm definitely not the most important sixteen-year-old on the planet. Not even ish. I'm just another prebumped girl dangerously close to wasting her prime reproductivity.

Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.

But the closer I got to my own marriage and maternity, the more I felt like I was only as praiseworthy as my healthy womb. Why was I the only one who seemed to see it this way?

We are the way we're supposed to be.

Who am I, that you should love me?" "You are My Queen," said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth. "Do you believe me?" he asked. "Yes," she answered. "Do you love me?" "Yes." "I love you." And she believed him.

Anthropologie is not butch, phantom or otherwise. It is Disney with a slightly more sophisticated but no less carefully engineered aesthetic. It is to adult women what princesses are to little girls. It is a twirling motion in the form of an international brand.

while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join.

But in the outside world, in places (on the rare occasions I visited them) where the vast blankness of the land and sky made even the enormous supermarkets seem tiny, where, to many, words like "Vassar" were just a random sequence of letters, where weather mattered more than most anything else, I often felt lost, irrelevant, fatuous. I

A nagging thought: What did I have to show for all that free time the mothers didn't have?

I craved . . . an ineffable state of being I can only describe as domestic integrity. This integrity has something to do with being able to not feel like an imposter in your home and, therefore, in your life.

But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate. It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify. But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole on my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory. It's a victory I celebrate every day.

I don't really want to have a baby; I want to want to have a baby." I longed to feel like everybody else, but I had to face the fact that I did not.

the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn't have HIV, which I already knew).

If you were a girl who loved above all to read and write and who could not imagine an adulthood in which these activities did not hold a central place, you probably knew even before puberty that you were headed for conflict.

be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you're sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you.

the body is a site of social encounter, not a vessel for American hyperindividualism.

As the surgeon Atul Gawande wrote of the medical profession, "Nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

I was not myself, but if I was not myself, how did I know that? It was as if the old me, the authentic me, were inside, struggling to break free of the forces that had inhabited its body. The ghost within.

These false answers such as, I am stone, I am bird, I am animal, I am man, I am woman, I am great, I am small are, in turn, received, tested and discarded until the Question arrives at the right and Final Answer, I AM GOD.

A man who never lies must have green blood in his veins, or blue or yellow, but definitely not red!

A moss which leaves its ocean becomes pale and dries up and a man which leaves his mother country is a moss which leaves it ocean!