Quotes About Identity

You know, Henry, we're the only people who get born into the enemy camp. I mean, black babies get born into black families, Jewish babies get born into Jewish families, but gay babies, we get born into straight families. How we survive it all is a miracle.

Paris looked back at me without expression. The silence went on for a second too long. "You're gay," he said. Still looking into his eyes, I said, "Yes, I am." "I didn't think so at first." "What gave me away?" "You didn't react at all when I mentioned my boyfriend. You didn't even blink. Straight men always give themselves away.

Because I feel like a fool," I said. "Falling for a straight guy. It's a fucking cliché." "Really, Henry? All you feel is foolish? Is that why you were about to throw away your sobriety?

I am just a low, uncouth person. I'm a low-type sort of man." Some

There are too many people trying to escape from reality because they do not see their identity as having purpose or meaning.

But a man's identity (or that of a community) is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies, each at the mercy of circumstance and each significant in proportion to its familiarity.

a man's identity (or that of a community) is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies, each at the mercy of circumstance and each significant in proportion to its familiarity.

to think nothing about the opinion of his society (if he be in any sense a member) is to be unconsciously influenced by it.

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

You must have me confused with myself

Whoever he said he was, thought Marsh, he was not from the immigration department, and the web that he was convinced Walsh had been weaving was beginning to unravel with disastrous and dangerous consequences.

Harry Marsham, who was known as Marsh to his friends, should have died that night.

though we belong to this country as much as this country belongs to us, we only move through its rooms as momentary visitors, projecting our ideas on its walls, that the best we can do is live a good life, perhaps add a couple replicas of ourselves...

Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?

I try again, with the friendliest-looking man I can find. He's middle-aged and round-bellied, like his group of friends, all wearing University of Wisconsin sweatshirts emblazoned with the schools mascot, Bucky Badger.

What if I forget her voice?' Sara said. 'You won't,' I said. 'You sound just like her.

Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [...], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines.

Despite the fact that he was a sixty-one year old man when he was naturalized as an American citizen, it's amazing how fully he's been appropriated by this country.

I feel most at home in the water. I disappear. That's where I belong.

I think to be - for me to be an American is - you know, it's one of the greatest things in the world for - you know, for me just because I've been able to grow up with everything. The freedom. You know, in my eyes this is the greatest country in the world.

So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Power wants us numbered and not named, carded and not just remembering our name, address, telephone number, purpose, social security number, PIN, and so forth. Power has good reasons. As long as we have papers, we cohere;

Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.