Quotes About Identity

people from islands are different. We have more freedom.

Is it so terrible to be Korean?" "It is terrible to be me.

I think he just got tired of trying to be a good Korean and quit. I was never a good Korean.

He had visited South Korea with his father several times, and everyone there always treated them like they were Japanese. It was no homecoming;

In a way, Solomon was Japanese, too, even if the Japanese didn't think so. Phoebe couldn't see this. There was more to being something than just blood.

It is possible that characters need to die for the author to make her moral point, for the author himself to regenerate by letting go of an ideal identity, or for the world to recognize the necessity of certain ideas and ideals to die.

nearly every Korean-Japanese person I met in Japan had some historical connection or social connection with the pachinko business—one of the very few businesses in which Koreans could find employment and have a stake.

In short, Korean-Japanese had to participate in small businesses, which were often given outsider or inferior status, because it was not possible to find work elsewhere.

the commodification of Asian hair,

not believing that a person you loved—yes, he had loved her—could end up being someone you never knew.

Anyway, the clerk was not wrong. And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.

If you want to realize yourselves all your pet illusions must be unmasked.

Oh that's right Keep away from me Please give me a push Don't let me understand you Don't realise me Or we might tumble together Depersonalized Identical Into the terrific Nirvana Me you --- you --- me

Some say that happy women are immaterial.

And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves.

Does your mirror Bedevil you?

I come from a long line of body snatchers, probably the top-notch body snatchers in America. No make that the world. Some people might think it's gross digging up bones or corpses, but who asked them? It's no big deal, but then I've been doing it since I got out of diapers.

Her face was soft now, damp from the steam of my bath and the heat of her news. Her eyebrows were as white as cornsilk, her eyelashes clear. My sister had a certain pale, bright beauty, while I was an almost blonde, a shadowy hybrid. Ginnie was willowy and golden, I was shorter and freckled. I imagined our in utero tug-of-war. How she had seized all those pale, paternal Scandinavian genes, pulled at those chromosomes until they stretched like taffy.

My dad's whole family is in Madras and I was born in America so we didn't have that big Indian community. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. When I talk about it people are like, 'meh, let's talk about something else.'

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.

People's reaction to me is sometimes "Uch, I just don't like her. I hate how she thinks she is so great." But it's not that I think I'm so great. I just don't hate myself. I do idiotic things all the time and I say crazy stuff I regret, but I don't let everything traumatize me. And the scary thing I have noticed is that some people really feel uncomfortable around women who don't hate themselves. So that's why you need to be a little bit brave.

Nothing gives you confidence like being a member of a small, weirdly specific, hard-to-find demographic.

I find it incredible impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks's "Landslide," especially the lyric: "I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you." I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don't cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox.

I didn't completely forget how to be nice or feminine because I have a career.