Quotes About Identity

Everybody's intrigued by someone comfortable in their own skin because most of us aren't.

He died in St. Vincent's. I got a call one night, and this very firm Negro voice said, 'Your dad, he ain't got no life signs.' I said, 'You mean he's dead?' 'We ain't 'lowed to use that word,' said the voice. 'He ain't got no life signs is all.' " 'That's okay,' I said. "He never did.'

We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.

And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?

Sometimes our dreams can be the most revealing things about us. Who we are when no one's looking, who we believe we're truly supposed to be, if we can get there.

Some people feel out of place when they're young, not because anything's wrong with them, but because there's something special that sets them apart. Something they haven't figured out yet.

Dreams can tell us a lot of things," I go on. "They're a kind of map of the inner life. Sometimes thinking of who we might someday be is the only way we can get through the reality of who we actually are.

I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats - the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size.The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time - but under this, I knew he was still lonely.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

How some victims don't have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don't believe the life they have is theirs to save.

That's what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against yourself.

Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn't have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn't find yourself, not even in the mirror.

Let's just say I've developed a theory that only the vanished truly leave their mark. And I still don't feel I've sorted it out. Maybe we never do survive our families.

Maybe that's the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.

It was terrible to feel so empty, as if I were nothing. Why couldn't I be happy? And just what was happines anyway?

i liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished whne he left. was my happiness so completely tied to him now that i could only feel like myself when he was near? i had no idea.

I had come alive here...this was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I'd been made for.

Your biological parents give you their genes, the map of your physical self. But whoever raises you makes you who you are, for better or for worse. Family dynamics are acted out, not built in, though someday scientists might prove otherwise.

The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same,

Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near?

Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?

That's obviously, isn't it?' she said. 'A hawk is always a hawk, except'- and here she raised on heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile - 'except when the hawk is a cabbage.' 'What?' Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed. 'Exactly,' Gertrude said.

And the adoption? How does that work with this theory about families?" "I see it this way. Your biological parents give you their genes, the map of your physical self. But whoever raises you makes you who you are, for better or for worse. Family dynamics are acted out, not built in, though someday scientists might prove otherwise.

said. "I would ask him to build another dwelling, just for you, and to take more care." He turned away, dismissing me, and said, partly over his shoulder, "You should know I have a moran's name now. I am arap Ruta." —