Quotes About Identity

The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the "I," prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors

It is a performance of blackness that whites want, not the real life of being black. They still want it, I think.

The names of families are the front doors of history.

More than six out of ten runaways from the Balls and their peers had been born in Africa.

You know how to spell that? G-U-Z-M-A-N. Don't you go spelling my name wrong, or I'll have to mess you up.

Frankenstein is actually an equivalent of how a gay person feels growing up.

But even in extreme old age, especially in old age, one shouldn't forget one's dick.

Having been fucked up by my family and community, I'll never know where my gayness came from, and where it ends and "neurosis" begins. But as a gay person I know I'm a vital element in our civilization.

Thank god I'm gay! It's so liberating!

The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple, and cast naked into the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity.

where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is—but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.

Q: What are your sexual preferences? A: Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. Q: Why not? A: I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I know people who lead really outrageous lives. I've never said that I was gay and I've never said that I wasn't. A lot of people would say that I wasn't because I never do anything about it. What I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else.

Oh, dear, there are so many things we're brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you... Why don't you travel? Why don't you get a master's degree in...something? Why don't you try doing this, that, or the other? Well, you're probably not doing it because it's not right. Why worry about it? God knows, there's enough to worry about without worrying about worrying about things.

Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—

We may be a small island, but we are not a small people

Watch what I do –           that reflects who I am. Don't just listen to what I say, that only reflects who I want to be.

Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger: cool guys, smart, lotta meat between the ears on those fellas, and certainly trying to define who we are in the world or the universe is a noble undertaking. But isn't it somewhat as legitimate to try to define the reason why people do the horrible things they do? It's a fascinating query for me. It's a kick. Hence, my plight. I write horror.

We define ourselves by the best that is in us, not the worst that has been done to us.

Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

The free men in Manchester knew the tenuousness of their lives and always endeavored to be upstanding; they knew they were slaves with just another title.

A woman born to teaching wakes in the morning desperate to be near her pupils. I was that way. I am that way. I have told my own children and my husband to put on my grave marker 'Mother' and 'Teacher.' That before all else, even my own name. And if the chiseler has room, to have him put 'Wife.' 'Wife' below my name. 'Dutiful Wife,' if he can manage it.

We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?

We have all been robbed of the land we have loved for a thousand years. Do you not see that, Welshman? Can you not imagine his rage? We were not even conquered. We were deceived.