Quotes About Identity

Marcie talked about her life, and she talked about the courses she was taking. She told Lily that she was a feminist and she said that women had to take back the space that men had stolen from them. She talked about her body. She talked about ownership. She said that she was proud of her period, and Lily thought that this was the oddest thing to be proud of. She herself wasn't ashamed of it, but she hadn't ever thought it worth discussing.

I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.

I could have said: I'm only a child but certain to end an outcast too.

You can not lie in your paintings, because you cannot hide from yourself.

culture – the collectively shared meaning

Nineties style isn't.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange I never thought I would be.

I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!

Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, 'Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

Look up here, I'm in heaven! I've got scars that can't be seen I've got drama, can't be stolen, Everybody knows me now (...) This way or no way You know I'll be free Just like that bluebird Now, ain't that just like me? - Lazarus

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.

All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan poet once told me.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn't 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.

People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display.

In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I'm a very important person.

People who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.

She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.

People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away - ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal and familial. This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor.

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.

Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.