Quotes About Identity

We were the rebels without a cause and he was our Sal Mineo.

El muchacho que yo había conocido era tímido y tenía dificultad para expresarse. Le gustaba dejarse llevar, que lo cogieran de la mano para entrar sin reservas en un mundo distinto. Era masculino y protector, pese a ser femenino y sumiso. Meticuloso en su vestuario y modales, también era capaz de un desorden atemorizante en su obra. Sus mundos eran solitarios y peligrosos, y vaticinaban libertad, éxtasis y liberación.

I have not sold myself to God. - Babelogue

When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself." (About Robert Mapplethorpe)

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures.

He had told me I had nothing to worry about, but in the end I did. Yet I understood why he couldn't tell me. I think having to define his impulses and confine his identity in terms of sexuality was foreign to him. His drives toward men were consuming but I never felt loved any less. It wasn't easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.

I'm more materialistic about myself than I am about objects

I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now.

Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.

I was born to know youTo give you your nameFreedom.

It's not running away when you're going back home.

We will not ever know ourselves again. Like the light that moves between the bars of light we sometimes called death, we , too, will have flowered, even with such unquenchable flames as these.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.