Quotes About Identity

People around the world are like onigiri. Everyone has an umeboshi with a different shape and color and flavor. But because its stuck on their back they might not be able to see their umeboshi. Maybe the reason people get jealous of each other is because they can see so clearly the umeboshi on other people's back. -Tohru Honda

Just be yourself and you'll be fine

Even if I'm following the path my parents set, I need to take my own dreams and beliefs with me.

It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.

A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people's evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.

A women who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people's evaluations.

And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?

But it did seem that the thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin.

Maybe what I want is to cut all ties with everybody. The thread or something that keeps me connected to the world, the worthless proof that I exist.

Fortunately for me, I ran across some girls I could get along with so I could enjoy high school life okay, but it must be awful for kids who don't get along with anybody. We're different from our parents, a completely different species from our teachers. And kids who are one grade apart you are in a different world altogether. In other words, we're basically surrounded by enemies and have to make it on our own.

Sich mit diesem oder jenem zu identifizieren, ist also ein normaler Vorgang. Gefährlich wird es, sobald eine einzige Identität bestimmend wird, sobald man nur noch Muslim ist oder Christ oder Deutscher, Iraner oder meinetwegen Anhänger eines bestimmten Fußballclubs oder eines Popstars. Dann wird aus der pragmatischen Einschränkung, die jede Art von Identifizierung bedeutet, eine reale Verstümmelung der Persönlichkeit.

There is a proverb that says, 'Talk so that I may know who you are.' But I say, 'Show me your eyes and I will know who you are.

I was like a woman walking through an enchanted world to which she did not belong. She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.

Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.

How had he become her every moment? How had a man become her whole life? How could a person consume all her attention? She didn't know how it had happened. She wasn't the sort of woman that gives her life away to anyone. Her life was too important to give to one man. Above all, her life was not her own but belonged to the world, which she wanted to change.

I had believed that my homeland was the whole world, just as when I was a child I believed that our street was the whole homeland. As I grew up so the street grew smaller. But when my being reached out beyond the homeland, the earth shrank and new feelings, that I was larger than before, filled me.

She was unsure of the meaning of the word 'envy' but had inherited it as she'd inherited her nose and arms and eyes.

I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, or emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong, in a home which was not mine, born from a father who was not my father, and from a mother who was not my mother.

Honestly, I never thought I'd actually be playing a teen lesbian. I didn't think it was going to go this far. But I'm glad that it did, because there have been a lot of fans who have expressed that they've been going through similar situations in their lives.

It's the standard-issue Indian male syndrome. Mothers and sisters on a pedestal on the one hand, and loose women and prostitutes below the boot on the other. And me, a good Marathi girl like his sisters, consorting with all of you wastrels and worse. Too confusing for him.

How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?

As George MacDonald wisely wrote, "The one principle of hell is, I am my own!" 4 Fierce pride usually protects this wrong perception.

Well, if there is a spectrum between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, which is a rather schematic way of looking at it, all nationalism contains elements of both, but Scotland is very far on the civic end of the spectrum. That is partly because nobody has ever been stupid enough to say that Scotland is an ethnicity in a genetic sense. A kingdom of Scotland existed long before anybody talked of a Scottish people. So that is one thing we have been spared.

I am always fascinated when people talk about "the forging of a nation." Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.