Quotes About Identity

In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

It is a very personal thing to me, because this is my basic voice, this is where I come from, and it is one of the oldest voice styles in human history.

America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it - - not always, but sometimes - for constructive purposes.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

We've gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

History is a means of access to ourselves.

Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.

A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

Imagine a part of the U.S.A., from which the U.S.A. started - where is the cradle of your history? This is Kosovo for Serbia.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.

I have no history but the length of my bones.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

Throughout history there have been black people who have played mammies, all sorts of offensive images, who didn't mind doing it.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

I feel like the history between Israel and Palestine has a lot in common with the history between India and Pakistan.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

There's not much place for the loyalists - especially the loyalists who left - in standard American history.