Quotes About Identity

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

Being a child was not fun for me.

Though they had been for years with Jesus, there was still much more of the old Jewish man than of the new Christian man in them. If they had been left to the freedom of their own will, they would probably have avoided the Samaritan territory altogether, and, like the rest of their countrymen, taken a roundabout way to Jerusalem by crossing to the eastward of the Jordan.

I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.

It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. Ever since I'd been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull's-eye painted on my head in rouge. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone.

What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

51. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

It isn't just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next.

You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you'd be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

Ever since I'd been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull's-eye painted on my head in rouge.

Had he himself ever felt Korean inside, for example? How would he know? Wouldn't it just feel like . . . himself? Whatever he'd felt, it was probably not what Scott felt. But also, he was Korean American, not Korean, a distinction he had never been able to explain sufficiently to the white people in his life so far,

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise.

I still didn't know I had written it to do this, but then I did. I wish I could show you the roomful of people who've told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be. I still don't know if I'd be in that room.

Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter's dementia.

In some way I had never known how to express, I'd feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before.

The life I led now I'd made so I would never be her again. I'd never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I

I became something they couldn't imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They

A collection like a circus of daredevils, but with the determined charm of a Chinese drag queen making her home in Iowa. Siasoco takes us on a trip through the world we know by way of characters I've not seen in fiction before, or at least, not enough of--characters with stories I have been waiting for. A bravura debut.

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what is was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once