Quotes About Identity

Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep.

The ' colonized do not know how to breath', the 'people here do not know how walk; they make little steps which do not get them ahead.

Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I now find myself between two classes; and I realized that, in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor.

all dark and serious, really. You know, the simplest thing in the world is for white kids that are a little bit troubled to go really pompous on it all—like you get a splinter in your finger and suddenly you have a whole grindcore

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite …the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.

My disease," she said, speaking fast, "dates back to Bible days. Leah had it, in the book of Genesis. It is wallfloweritis." "Huh?" broke in Harding, dazedly curious. "Wallfloweritis," she repeated stoutly. "An acute and chronic case of being a perennial wallflower. Oh, please don't be polite and silly and deny it!

We have one symptom in common already. Only you may think I've an advantage over you because I can change my name by marrying. Well, I can't. I shall be twenty-four next April. And nobody ever asked me to marry. That means nobody ever is going to. So let's pass on to the next symptom.

We have to have that education. We have to have it. We have to master the western culture. We have to master the English language. It's the only way we can strengthen and fortify our own way of life. We have to know who we are working with and how to work with them.

You can't wash away overnight several years of clockwork routine and constant disassembling of self.

He had a ponytail. But this was not a regular ponytail from the Sixties, not a ponytail for show or for fashion. It was more. It was a personal ponytail, something more defining and lasting. A personal thing is different, and all the books and all the magazines in the world can't tell you what that is.

But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised . . . . they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well.

These are the maps we make of ourselves, The foods and mountains, the world, The stars, the air we are for each other— These are the measure. We are ourselves, Every inch a mile for each other. My friend, that's all. And it is everything. We used to be somebody else, One here, one there, but now together We are today, and will be tomorrow.

Even so, I'm somebody. I'm the Discoverer of Nature. I'm the Argonaut of true sensations. I bring a new Universe to the Universe Because I bring the Universe to itself.

I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside. I don't believe I exist behind myself.

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside. But what is it, a row of trees? It's just trees. Row and the plural trees aren't things, they're names.

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it. Each thing only reminds us of what it is And it's only what nothing else is. The fact that it's it separates it from every other thing. (Everything's nothing without another thing that's not it).

Quem ama é diferente de quem é. É a mesma pessoa sem ninguém

Digo de mim 'sou eu'. E não digo mais nada. Que mais há a dizer?

Estaba condenado con la maldición del que sabe dos idiomas y entiende, secretamente, que no domina del todo ninguno de los dos. Ahora era capaz de comparar; todo se me multiplicaba por dos. En cada sitio terminaba optando por el punto de vista ajeno. Ahora veo todo, esté donde esté, como un extranjero.

Es que no es su pololo" como si "pololo" fuese un estado civil comprobable.

Uno tiene una vida incluso cuando no tiene vida.