Quotes About Identity

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along?the same person that I am today.

I also remembered that you were beautiful." "Memory does play tricks on us." "No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.

I drag my myth around with me

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

A man does not belong to the place he was born in, but to the place he chooses to die.

I don't want any description of me to be accurate. I want it to be flattering.

A hero is one who wants to be himself .

La lengua, que es siempre y últimamente la lengua materna, no se aprende en Gramáticas y diccionarios, sino en el decir de la Gente

Because man's being is made of strange stuff....

Finally, under Mao Zedong the project of destroying the old core of Chinese identity was carried to a grim conclusion with a violent and totalistic resolve. But, like a forest fire that clears the way for new growth, it may have ironically also helped prepare the way to usher in a spectacular new kind of economic growth under his successor, Deng Xiaoping.

Calling is more than purely cultural, but it is also more than purely personal. Discover the meaning of calling and you discover the heart of the gospel itself.

Somehow we human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.

For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.

what matters for each of us is the adequacy and truth of what we come to believe is the meaning of life—and therefore the source from which we derive our sense of identity, purpose, ethics and community.

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.

The truth is that we are a generation that has too much to live with and too little to live for.

The West is cutting off its Jewish and Christian roots and destroying the entire root system of its culture

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.

Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once—who we are created to be and who we are called to be. Not

As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are.

We are never more completely ourselves than when we make that decision to trust in God.

Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.

The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves. In such an age, "I post, therefore I am.