Quotes About Identity

what I'd really like to know is how it feels to be on my own. Not someone's daughter or wife, I mean…but my own person." "Oh." It seemed I'd surprised him. "There isn't a lot of that kind of thinking around here." "Of course there is," I told him, trying to draw a smile. "It's just usually a man who's doing it.

Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near? I had no idea.

and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was his life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn't have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn't know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.

He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

He's never been a throwaway kid. Never experienced the world in a woman's body, or a girl's. Never had a reason to confuse love with suffering.

I have fought for independence here, and freedom too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing.

If the women in Paris were peacocks, I was a garden-variety hen.

When she left him, she swore she would "never try it again," meaning marriage. But I don't think she knew how to be fully herself when she was with a man or could feel anything but baffled by the competing demands of career and domesticity. Her struggles are poignant and real to me, and all too familiar

We're all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren't your own person at all—are you?

This is everything I love. It's all right here. We're our own country.

as if whatever life she's had before now doesn't take up space or trouble her in the least.

I can't expect him to be as tuned in to Cameron's vulnerabilities as I am. He's never been a throwaway kid. Never experienced the world in a woman's body, or a girl's. Never had a reason to confuse love with suffering.

Everyone deserves to belong somewhere.

Mine hadn't, and neither had Cameron's. All the scars I still carry, she carries, too. Trust issues, attachment trouble, identity problems, feelings of emptiness, isolation, alienation, and despair—cracks in the soul that can't be mended. I've seen it. I've lived it. How anyone with a hole inside them will search on and on, sometimes all their lives, for ways to fill it.

Too much was new about India, and the days had no anchor. Jock might have fallen for the bold girl I was when I was fourteen, but he didn't really know me any more than I knew him.

This valley was more than my home. It beat in me like the drum of my own heart. Only

I wasn't raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that. That's movie dialogue, not real life.

I don't even have a savings account because I don't know my mom's maiden name, and apparently that's the key to the whole thing.

I've decided that perhaps I'm bulimic and just keep forgetting to purge.

I don't have a bank account because I don't know my mother's maiden name.

There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities.

Yeah, ideally, I'd probably wish to be more anonymous. But scrutiny and success go together. And I want to be successful.

You are what you are, until you decide to be different.

It's not how you look, it's how you feel in the dark