Quotes About Identity

Who we're told to be carries the weight of history behind it. We may not like it but we better know it. Who we're told to be is no accident, but rather a purposeful construction of centuries of accumulated fear. Who we're told to be can be deliberately deconstructed.

We spend our lives hiding deep inside ourselves in paralyzing fear that someone might see us as we really are, or worse: We might see ourselves.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

We mock the things we are to be.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

call m-m-me." Then there was a long pause and he said, "If n-n-nobody answers…" another pause, "…it's m-me!

It was no place, Ryan thought, to come home to. ???

l'altezza dei monti non si misura con gli strumenti dei cartografi, come il valore delle persone non da ciò che fanno o sembrano, ma da ciò che sono.

Non pretendo di essere capito, ognuno di noi è l'enigma di se stesso.

Aveva sbattuto le palpebre, come se non fosse sicura di dov'era, né di essere chi era. Però riconobbe me, e mi sorrise. Per te non significa niente - ma per un uomo, a volte, un bagliore nella pupilla della persona amata può valere più di tutto. Capisci? Ha riconosciuto me prima di se stessa. Io testimoniavo che lei era viva, che lei esisteva - che è esistita.

In ciò che non ha voluto essere lo riconosco.

I think I'd rather be beautiful. Beautiful makes evolving into any sort of a person with morals and character very difficult.

I'm none of those things. I'm just me.

Look, you're a lot of things to me—but a dog? Not one of them." I whisper, "What am I to you?" He stares at me a long time. "Sometimes you're my mom—but a good one that doesn't lie. Sometimes you're my frickin' wife—with your folded laundry and fried

chicken, and cinnamon cookies with my name frosted on them. Sometimes you're my therapist, sometimes you're my tormentor, sometimes you're my secret crush. But you're never my dog. And right now, you're my dance partner." He lifts his chin. "Let me see if I can sweep you off your feet.

All I am is a skinful of old bones on horseback.

The effort to separate ourselves whether by race, creed, color, religion, or status is as costly to the separator as to those who would be separated.

A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.

I miss the Stella girls telling me what I am. That I'm sweet and placid and accommodating and loyal and nonthreatening and good to have around. And Mia. I want her to say, "Frankie, you're silly, you're lazy, you're talented, you're passionate, you're restrained, you're blossoming, you're contrary." I want to be an adjective again. But I'm a noun. A nothing. A nobody. A no one.

And then their voices stopped and their souls stood still and they ceased being who they had been. Because who they were had always been determined by him.

You just have to belong. Long to be.

This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it's a different kind of devastating.

Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across.

When I grow up, I'm going to be my mother.