Quotes About Identity

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious - friendship and learning.

In other words, I am the Brunette Who Keeps Her Head.

A skull graces the bulging muscle of one large bicep, a rose with something stuck in it is along another arm, a spider crawls along his back, and other intricately woven lines join them all together. These tattoos mean something.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, I whose choices made her what she will be?

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)

It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention. Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened.

Only remembering that a self in exile is still a self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

Like Others In the end, I was like others. A person. Sometimes embarrassed, sometimes afraid. When "Fire!" was shouted, some ran toward it, some away— I neck-deep among them.

The self in exile remains the self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

The more we cling to the belief in a self, the more pain and alienation we feel.

Enlightenment is the total sense of freedom that comes from letting go of the concept of being an individual "self".

Asked once what he was doing to keep busy in retirement, Hank Aaron replied, "I'm being Hank Aaron.

Is she become a rag doll? Are the wolves become children? It seems quite possible, there on the twilight fringes of dying. With some faint spark of herself, the little girl holds on to the idea. Even a rag doll has more life than does a dying child.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago — the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

They learn to relate by caretaking, pleasing, isolating, or acting out rather than fully relating with their true and authentic selves. As a result, they feel accepted for their roles, not for who they were. Adult Children often have no idea how to have an equal partner relationship with healthy communication and normal conflict. As one ACOA said, "I feel that everyone else got a book at birth on how to live life, have relationships, and parent—and I never got my copy.

Wounded, narcissistic parents may need a grateful child. A father who was unpopular or clumsy as a child may need an athlete. A parent afraid of his or her own anger may need an acting-out child. The real child, the child who was meant to grow and develop into a self in his or her own right, is often never seen. Even if Joan's interest had been in science or math, her mother needed a dancer—and children will make every effort to be what is expected of them.

Your child is constantly making decisions about himself and the world, and how to find belonging and significance in that world.

children are shaped by both the raw material they inherit and the forces around them, they also bring to the world something unique to them: their own spirit and identity.

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.