Quotes About Identity

And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?

Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.

refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?

It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.

name's Regina Dallas,' I said, 'It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.' '' So

and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause

Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been plain people and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like; they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.

She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?

Mrs. Fairford smiled. "I've sometimes thought," she mused, "that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he's the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman—and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

Well—it had all grown out of the other choice she had made when, years ago, she had said: "Thy gods shall not be my gods." And now she but dimly guessed who their gods were. At the moment when her very life depended on her knowing their passwords, holding the clue to their labyrinth, she stood outside the mysterious circle and vainly groped for a way in.

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.

S? emigreze! Parc? un gentleman ar putea s?-?i p?r?seasc? patria!

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia," she reflected, "they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

The Church, like every body corporate, may alter her laws without changing her identity.

Discretion," said Fen with great complacency, "is my middle name." "I dare say. But very few people use their middle names.

I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears."106

Actually Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues