Quotes About Identity

Cept for Ben, who I can't describe much further without seeming soft and stupid and like a boy, so I won't, just to say that I never knew my pa, but if you woke up one day and had a choice of picking one from a selecshun, if someone said, here, then, boy, pick who you want, then Ben wouldn't be the worst choice you could make that morning.

You are the one who called me, Conor O'Malley, it said, looking at him seriously. You are the one with the answers to these questions.

And I feel her against me - And I think Viola - I think VIOLA! - I think VIOLA!!!!

This is who you are, do you see?" Tomasz continues.

But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now. Aren't we?

There wasn't anything more, and the one good thing that was mine wasn't mine after all.

Little girls aren't naturally lost," Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. "Someone makes them that way.

But wherever I am, whatever this world is, I've just got to be sure I'm me and that's what's real...Know yourself and go in swinging. If it hurts when you hit it, it might be real, too.

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don't remember nothing, don't remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone's ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it's true, but who knows?

No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version.

I thought Gudmund being taken away was the worst thing could ever happen to me, but it wasn't. The worst was finding out he was never really all mine in the first place. And so, for a moment, for a terrible, unbelievably shitty afternoon in a shitty little town on the shitty, freezing coast of Washington, I had nothing. There wasn't anything more, and the one good thing that was mine wasn't mine after all.

What kind of person am I when seen by you?

What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?

The boy who refused to lose his soul.

She regards me quietly and then she quotes something Mistress Coyle once said to me. "We are the choices we make." It takes me a second to realize she's just said goodbye.

There was his father, looking totally different but exactly the same. "Hey, son," his dad said, his voice bending in that weird way that America had started to shape it.

The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.

Know yourself, he thinks, as they sail past his house. And go in swinging.

I'd keep my eyes open, remember who I was, and go in swinging

And we dream the same in my town as you probably do in a city. We yearn the same, wish the same. We're just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.

C'era una volta un uomo invisibile, che s'era stufato di non essere visto da nessuno. Non che fosse davvero invisibile. Il fatto era che la gente era abituato a non vederlo. E se nessuno ti vede, esisti davvero?

The Third Tale There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him. And if no one sees you, are you really there at all? And then one day the invisible man decided, I will make them see me. He called for a monster.

Along the edge of this green lived a man. His name is not important, as no one ever used it. The villagers only ever called him the Apothecary.

There are worse things than being invisible, the monster had said, and it was right.