Quotes About Identity

A brain tumor can radically change your self-identity. Even if your tumor is removed and you are doing well, you may continue to see yourself as someone who is very different from other people.

John G. turns on him, hands on hips, hair caked with snow. 'Hey, buddy, let me tell you something. Drugs are the only thing I got. I am a drug addict. That's all I've ever been and that's all I'll ever be. Even if I'm not putting a needle in my arm or pipe in my mouth right this second, the thought is still in my mind.' He taps the side of his head. 'And if I decide I'm gonna get high to deal with the pressures in my life, there's not a fuckin' thing you can do about it.

See? They only get idiots to do these jobs." John G. stands there with his eyelids throbbing. Should he take a swing at the guy? After all, he's got nothing left to lose. On the other hand, this job is the only thing between him and the abyss. Everything else that marked his place in the world is gone. He struggles to decide for a few seconds and then goes back to the motorman's cabin.

The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.

A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there

Collin, the man who cannot be killed off, whose identity is both branded on him and rendered illegible, challenges, or defies, the very coherence of such an entity, suggesting the possibility that the very subject of The Human Comedy, human society itself, is at bottom an illusion if not a fraud.

Balzac's semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.

I came to Australia as a damaged grown up adult, and it took me years to heal, so my perspective of the national Australian pride is not full. It [assimilation] penetrates, it's accepted, it's tolerated, and I think the third generation it is absorbed. I don't know about the second generation, - Holocaust survivor, Kitia Altman

I feel Australian. He feels Czechoslovakian. I am completely home here. I give them [Australia] my children, we do good, we work all our lives, we give Australia a lot. Libuse Slehofer

Very much. Very much a melting pot. You don't draw lines anymore. There's no such thing as 'bloody this' or 'bloody that'. There's no such thing anymore. We all Aussies. And the Aussies respect us as Aussies. I am accepted as an Australian and I feel like one too. - Ibolya Cabrero-Kovacs, Hungarian Freedom Fighter

An Italian migrant once told me that … and he said, 'To be a migrant is both a curse and a blessing, because you will always hang between two countries.' This is a very good country, I quite enjoy it, it's fine, but I miss my country [Holland]. But I can't go back anymore my country's not my country anymore. Tinie Nieuwenhoven's, Dutch

They worked hard all their lives, what they basically did was, they built a little Ukraine, a little society for themselves here in Brisbane. They did this in all the cities … not a ghetto, it wasn't inward looking to that extent, but it was inward looking in the sense that it was a place to go—somewhere where you could identify; where you could be understood; go about remembering and preserving your roots. - Walter Sucharsky, 2nd Generation Australian

One thing that I find very weird here in Australia is Latvians in Australia celebrate Latvian traditions by a calendar, not by the seasons as they do in Latvia. It's a bit strange for me, everyone said a few weeks ago, 'Merry Christmas,' in Latvian, or maybe Winterfest, and here I was sweating like a pig saying, 'Merry Winterfest!' – Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I'm good at, what I care about most, and where I'm headed.

I only feel like myself when I am alone.

Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.

It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.

I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people.

So," he said, after he had taken a bite "you're not going to tell me?" "Not going to tell you what?" "Whether or not you're gay." "No," I said. "Why should I? Did you tell your parents?" "I wasn't gay," said my father. "I was straight." "So, what, if you're gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you're straight you don't?

If you know the country he said then you will be a wild colonial boy forever

We] picked them up, that is, their internals, and did not know the soldiers they belonged to. So you see, the cavalryman got an infantryman's guts, and an infantryman got a cavalryman's guts.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Restlessness is the curse of our time. Put down roots, belong.

As Luke's story unfolds, Jesus continues to undermine expectations involving political power and Jewish identity. In his first public appearance, in a synagogue service, he claims to be the messiah, which creates quite a buzz of support—until he tells them that he will bless Gentiles and be rejected by his own kinsmen. The crowd responds by trying to throw Jesus off a cliff. Israel's messiah isn't supposed to say things like this.