Quotes About Identity

He was starting to think that consciousness wasn't some lighthouse of self-knowing but merely a little cave where you made up stories about yourself, whatever it took to hide the shit and the slime, the utter mollusk you were in your deepest nature. He wondered what was down there, under the shit, what kind of bedrock he might strike. Take

It was a kind of sin, certainly, to forget—but it was not easy to remember, especially when names changed, languages changed. A century-old name held that century; when replaced, a hundred years were wiped out at one stroke. Amnesia set it; reality itself, being metamorphic, was affected.

I'm not like them, but I can pretend.

im so ugly but thats ok cuz so are you.

Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all.

How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, and your personality dissolves.

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realization, the person ceases.

Exactly as the shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the "I am the body" idea. And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose, according to the pattern of destiny.

The name given to the body is not your name. What are you beyond the body and its name? For a moment, see that you are without the body and its name.' This is termed 'waiting at the doorstep of God for a moment'. Say what you are without considering the body and its name. Look at yourself without the body and its name. Understand this point and you understand everything.

The core of Sri Nisargadatta's simple and direct message is this: focus on the 'I am' (consciousness, beingness) and enquire into its Source. In becoming conscious of consciousness itself, we may discover we are not limited to the body, mind, or any passing identity, thereby realising our unlimited nature in this very life.

E]ven today, when confident and self-affirmative lesbian identities have emerged and are available to women, images of `lesbianism' are still regularly appropriated by a male heterosexual pornographic imagination which cannot accept that this is one party to which men are not invited and at which their presence is not necessary.

You'll never decide what you want until you've decided who you are.

No seu primeiro domingo em Galesburg, o diretor e a Sra. Hammond o levaram à igreja presbiteriana, mas depois disso Xamã disse a eles que era congregacionista e, aos estudantes de religião, dizia que era presbiteriano, assim, todas as manhãs de domingo, ele podia passear livremente pela cidade.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough

But in the same way a man's nose and ears become exaggerated as he ages, so do the psychological issues that define him. We

You have kids and you think I made you, so we're the same, but it's not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.

Of the true mysteries of the universe . . . the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction--Who ARE you, and why are you different from me?--from a NYT Book Review review of Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world--sights, sounds, smells--into coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble? Hailstones on a tin roof....What happens when your life can't be translated into a linear narrative?

You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.

Sitting in the back of a cab, Scott pictures the boy eating cereal in front of the tv late at night - unable to sleep - watching a dog drawn from letters d-o-g talk to a cat drawn from the letters c-a-t. If only real life were that simple, where everyone we met and every place we went was fashioned from the pure essence of its identity. Where you looked at a man and saw the letters f-r-i-e-n-d, and looked at a woman and saw the word w-i-f-e.

The only thing that can change who we are is life.