Quotes About Identity

To extend oneself does not necessarily mean to have an erection.

People sometimes think I'm gay because I once played a gay in a movie. It's funny. Audiences don't think you're a murderer if you play a murderer, but they do think you're gay if you play a gay.

Once in a while, life gives you a chance to measure your worth. Sometimes you're called upon to make a split-second decision to do the right thing, defining which way your life will go. These are the decisions that make you who you are.

But everything had changed, and I was becoming more and more of who I really was, and less of this person I had thought I wanted to be.

Once in a while, life gives you a chance to measure your worth. Sometimes you're called upon to make a split-second decision to do the right thing, defining which way your life will go. These are the choices that make you who you are.

I never thought I'd have a story worth telling, at least not one about me.

You've lost sight of the fact that it is our weeniness that makes us human!

Many things have been said about what happened, but I don't know either. Maybe someday. One thing I'm sure of is that all the things that have happened to me, good and bad, happy and sad, have made me what I am today.

It's more important to know whom you are called to be with than what you are called to do.

I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called "Irish.

Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live.

I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it.

Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.

We were defined by what we did. What we had to do. I think this is why guys like football, and why they join the army, because as long as you are playing the game or following orders you do not have to figure out who you really are.

So who are you today?

Guys have four personalities: the one they use with their parents, the one they use around other adults, the one they use for talking to girls, and the one they use for hanging with their friends. Leakage between the various personality types can cause serious problems.

Do they really think that attending mass will make them better, or happier, or save them from an eternity of hellfire? Maybe they do. But there are something like ten thousand religions in the world. What makes them think that they happen to have been born into the right one? I have asked this question several times. So far, I haven't heard a good answer. Better to start your own religion, I think. That way you get to be your own pope.

I label Derek an idiot, I label Bridgette an overachieving priss-butt, I label Arfie a dog, and I label myself the beef in a SooperSlider.

Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you've never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

I find my grandfather, buried with Great-Aunt Hannah and Uncle Jack. His surname is spelled 'MacCarthy', with an extra 'a'; like many names here, it's a translation from the Irish, so the 'a' is optional, and may appear and disappear with the generations.

It's not easy to retire at 31. In one respect I was glad I was done. But after a few years of having fun, I got a little restless. When you're 33 34, and you don't have a focus, you can get kind of lost. As a man, you feel a little bit unfulfilled.