Quotes About Identity

le vrai bourgeois, de nos jours, est celui qui méprise sa propre classe, joue au rebelle et tire gloire de s'autodéprécier en permanence. La

Uno se enfrenta a la peor prueba que existe: uno mismo. He conocido a muchos bravucones que se desinflaban llegado el momento.

Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe.

L'écrivain est le langage qui se dévore lui-même dans l'homme dévoré par le mentir qui en fait le noyau.

Homogénéité culturelle, historique, tel est le destin de l'homme.

Pie may just be the Madonna-whore of the dessert world.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him 'the butcher'.

Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men.

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.

Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I've ever known was brought up on that saying.

You're the Picasso of pain, A fantasy in fleshtone And though you're never the same You're never far from the mark

If at any moment of the day I ever think I'm remotely cool at all, which is hardly ever, I have two daughters who make sure that never happens.

Understanding anyone begins with the person's family history and the culture he or she is a part of.

Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common -- not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.

Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.

What a name – Pyotr Frankis. I wondered who had made it up for him. Pyotr Frankis, Jascha – Slavs all over the place, it would seem. Just like my great-grandmother. I felt for her in my mind about the same way you'd feel for a stray piece of food in your mouth with your tongue, but as usual, I had no sense of her beyond a particularly intense memory.

nothing could easily erase the vision of Alice, crawling with lice, or Mama, eyes clenched shut under one more indignity, one more reminder of who we were, and what we had lost.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

I don't think America will have really made it until we have our own salad dressing. Until then we're stuck behind the French, Italians, Russians and Caesarians.

You do it for yourself, not for anyone else. When you make something beautiful, you change. You put something of yourself into the thing you make. You're a different person when you're done.

I wasn't wearing war paint. But that didn't matter. I didn't need war paint. I was a different person than I had been, back then.