Quotes About Identity

A shark without teeth is just a mermaid.

A shark that can't bite is nothing but a mermaid.

Knowledge of self is acquired through a shattered mirror. But we can always close our eyes.

If I were a bass, I'd want to be a tarpon," I

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle

You raise your child the best you can. You release the child into the world, like launching a toy sailboat in a pond. Except the world is not a placid pond. More often, it is a raging sea, and life a perfect storm of the unexpected crashing head-on into the unbearable. There is no way to prepare the child for such a world because your own personal crises, traumas and failures are just that, your own. Your child, as you will belatedly learn, is not you.

Knowledge of self is a precious commodity, dearer than the finest gemstone. The mirror I held before me now was not laced with gold filigree. It was cold and flat and bared every shadow on my soul.

How then, in the time that followed, did I become someone I didn't know?

God did not create us to be nobodies, but to be somebodies in communion with him through participation in Jesus' glorious story.

In my mind android is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way.

We tear ourselves inside out for something the world may love, then base our worth on that.

I don't get superheroes," she says, "if you could see through everything you'd see nothing at all.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Me? I'm a mocker!

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay.

I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68.

And thus I wonder about so many gay men I've met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario's cape.