Quotes About Identity

You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?' 'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody.

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

No one in France has that accent. No one has a French accent like that, except on TV, when English actors show that they are French by speaking English in a French accent that no French person ever actually uses. But we have come to accept that. We want Hercule Poirot because it sounds intelligent and travelled and cultured and everything that we're not, British or Asian.

I thought maybe you were different, but you ended up being the same kind of lame guy that I perpetually date, and it just freaks me out a little. That maybe you're the only type out there. These baby boys who run around in nice clothes, but all they really wanna do is breast-feed for the rest of their days …

Look, you're not French, let's face it . . . and who wants to be, anyway, in this day and age? Being French is way past cool.

WRITER So, go on then, get all smart about it—can you deny what I'm saying? Huh? Jesus was not some . . . Indonesian guy! He just wasn't. ACTOR I'm not Indonesian! Jesus Christ!

WRITER Right, but no offense, you guys eat dogs for lunch and many of us in the West here find that disgusting, so . . . ACTOR I'm not Korean, you prick! I'm of Chinese descent but I was born in Idaho! I-da-ho. You got that? / My God . . .

Listen, I speak from experience when I say . . . just because some man doesn't have one does not necessarily mean that he can't be one.

in a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.

I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.

Each of us, A CEll Of Awareness... imperfect, and incomplete. Genetic blends, with uncertain ends.

We believe there are certain things people "have," certain things people "do," and even certain things people "are." These beliefs do not necessarily reflect the structure of reality they simply reflect an habitual way of talking about reality.

This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

The argument is that they need to assimilate and adopt American customs. And that feeling often leads to cruelty and crime.

Prancers are almost always gay.

World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.

He had not felt any genuine grief until the moment he accepted the flag, because he had hardly known his father and knew even less about what his father had done.

We find a place on the lower [sic] East Side," confesses one suburban couple in the genteel pages of the New Yorker: Ludlow Street. No one we know would think of living here. No one we know has ever heard of Ludlow Street.

After all, everyone's favorite subject is themselves.