Quotes About Identity

He wanted the country to stay one country—the United States of America.

If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.

If Irish or Italian culture dies in America it really isn't that big a deal. They will still exist in Italy and Ireland. Not so with us. There is no other place. North America is our old country.

She remembered the old man in the bar in the Mission District telling her, 'We are the biggest tribe of all, us displaced ones, us urban Indians, us sidewalk redskins.

He looked at himself in the mirror and frowned. He had a habit of running a hand into his hair when he was concentrating hard, which made it spike. Right now he resembled a pissed-off cockatoo

In no order of things is adolescence the time of simple life.

The people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.

We received our coloring from Norsemen. Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it to know yourself... know what you want.

And when I shed my old skin, what soft and tender flesh did I expose?

The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it's different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there's nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that's not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead.

I was baffled by my fuzzy hair and the attention it drew, and the urgency with which people advised that I have it 'straightened', as if it posed a threat.

I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.

Supported by love, any tissue-paper identity may stand like stone.

1. Adult children of alcoholics guess at what normal behavior is. 2. Adult children of alcoholics have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end.

I really don't know anything else because my brothers were famous when I was two years old. So I know nothing else, no other life.

We want to recast the debate shifting from arguments over origins (is homosexuality 'in born' or 'chosen'?)...In our view, it does not matter how one becomes homosexual, because there is nothing wrong with homosexuality... We believe that the freedom to be different and act differently should not depend on whether or not an individual is 'born that way.

You have no tail!" said Brightspot. her own whipped suddenly forward; she stared, first at it, then at Wilson."How do you manage?

I think people ought to be called what they want to be called.

there is very little 'of course' when it comes to custom

Tocohl frowned, and saw Kejesli suddenly for what he was. He was a man trying not to be Sheveschkem, without conscious knowledge of what being Sheveschkem actually entailed. He spoke GalLing' but danced Sheveschkem; he wore worlds' motley, but lowered his ceiling.

If a girl were asked which part of a plant she would be, would any choose the root? Blindly clutching the dark earth, never seeing sun nor feeling wind? Toiling there to feed the stem and flower with never a thank-you from them? And who would choose to be the thorn? Thorns protect the plant from pluckers, but who gives honor to them? Nay, any girl would choose to be the bud, opening to the sun, fragrant and beautiful, tickled by bees and butterflies, and looked upon with love.