Quotes About Identity

Their leader wore a Nazi helmet and had renamed himself Heimlich in honor of the man who ran the SS, not knowing he'd confused the Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choke victims and Heinrich Himmler.

Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old-son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in the name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber.

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

In small letters, now a little blurry, it read Omnia mea mecum porto, Latin for "All that is mine I carry with me.

All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.

I could not help seeing in Laurie the ghost of her younger self, the teenaged girl with a lovely, full, heart-shaped face. I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our DNA.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but

Omnia mea mecum porto, all that is mine I carry with me.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed...

So much of who we are is where we have been.

More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I'd still be ugly, sure, but I'd be rich and ugly. I'd still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I'd be rich enough for them not to care. I'd no longer be a social misfit, I'd be eccentric. And most of all, I'd no longer be what I was, I'd be something different.

My great fear in this life didn't have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.

When the Corps of Discovery dropped anchor at a Mandan village in 1804, they were met by blond-haired, blue-eyed Mandans—the offspring of native women and French explorers or trappers. On

A person can't help their birth.

once believed I was a foundling with royal blood—Plantagenet, I think it was. I don't know how I managed to get on my parents' doorstep,

You are a hedgehog, my friend. A walking, talking hedgehog.

A man will be known by his books.

This room was the resort of men who hadn't much beyond a sense of themselves and weren't inclined to have that sense diminished. Harkness recognised a feeling he had experienced in other East-End pubs, and understood precisely where the tension came from. It came from the realisation that just by coming in you had shucked the protection of your social status. In this place your only credentials were yourself.

Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt.

What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?

You are what you worship. And you worship what you love. —James K. A. Smith

Her mother had once told her that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. "You always have to take yourself with you," she said. And now, bending towards her mother, Hope wondered if in death you were finally able to run away from yourself. This might be death's gift. She knew that the thought wasn't terribly profound, but she was moved by the notion of completion and of escape.