Quotes About Identity

He paused, looked Thad in the eye, and told him through a sarcastic smirk, "I see you brought your two daddies tonight. Are they proud of their boy toy?

He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.

A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

I am delighted to be back home in Galway, the place I first came to as a 19-year-old in 1960. It's here where my heart is and will forever be.

Father Sergius nodded. "Yes, but not as a pious form of life that one puts on like an overcoat. Rather, he lives this mystery without thinking about it. It is not something he does; it is something he is.

He had become like a son to Pawel because Pawel had no wife or child, and because Pawel was a prince without a kingdom, who searched within himself for a father's heart.

What shall I become that I have not already become? Do we create ourselves, or are we created?

I mean the breaking of continuity. When you lose your place in the stream of time, you become a person who is completely dependent on the social.

to hide them. "A man is himself and no other", Josip says. "He is an island in the sea of being. And each island is as no other. The islands are connected because they have come forth from the sea, and the sea flows between them. It separates them yet unites them, if they learn to swim.

the false self must die in order for the true self to be born.

In all your years of living," said Elijah, "has no one told you that it is possible to be restored to what one was created to be?

People don't always understand a lack of patriotism

But returning to our subject", David continued with a smile. "For me, the way to reduce misinterpretation when speaking with another person is to keep before the eyes of my heart a reverence for the mystery within him, his unknown mission, his identity hidden in the mind of the Most High.

rare indeed was the soul who remained unaffected by his own public image.

free relationship—" "Truly free relationships are also responsible ones. Any attempt to deemphasize the true community of the universal Church in favor of the supposedly more democratic model of regional churches is a grave mistake. One of the consistent tactics of tyranny is to divide and neutralize its opponents, to isolate those movements or voices that stand in opposition to the dissolving of identity.

He understood then what bear it would be his lot to wrestle with. Not blacks or grizzlies. But the one that struggled for mastery within his own being and had already been identified for him: fear.

Man is a creature of Heaven and earth, but he no longer knows it. He no longer knows himself.

Was there a missing component in all human beings? The rural masses seeking the metropolis; the urban young fleeing to the woods. Women pretending to be men; men becoming more like women; everyone aping divinity in his desperation to escape creaturehood?

5. Evaluate your friendships. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote and other works, writes: "Tell me what company you keep, and I'll tell you who you are.

It's impossible to lose that which does not belong to you.

I'm an Englishman, after all