Quotes About Identity

Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being "normal" and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.

Conformity is a mask behind which students can hide their identity or the fact that they haven't yet figured out their identity.

Group membership can modify individuals' perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an "imaginary audience", meaning that they believed that other people are just as attuned to their appearance and behavior as they are.

Students usually don't refer to themselves as nerds until someone else accuses them of being one.

The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers.

Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn't true, would you hit him or smile? That's how easy it is to tell.

In our neighbourhood you believed the same things as everybody else, you wore the same clothes as everybody else and you planned to go into the same job as your father.

You can only find out what you are from what you are not which is everything and nothing. Your home is everywhere and nowhere. Your true identity is no identity. You aren't an owner but a messenger of the infinity, The no-thing is open to everything, timeless and Free.

L'exilé est à la fois, et non pas successivement, émigrant et immigrant. Il ne cesse de l'être, revendiquant et impliquant deux territorialités pour en dessiner une troisième, ce qui n'est pas autorisé au migrant dont la saisie institutionnelle neutralise le parcours entre départ et arrivée. (p. 107)

It was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.

Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch's ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers and other experts, like archeologists, sociologists and historians, were called to examine the genealogies of these people. And emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.

Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?

How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognizing some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?

They kept poking him in his bony ribs, wanting to know: Who do you reckon you are? What his name was and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that?

How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.

What we are is nothing other than what we do

I was fascinated by Siegfried's wooden leg, a remembrance of the 1914 Battle of the Sommes, where he had earned the Iron Cross I Class for conspicuous bravery. He was proud of his service for the Fatherland; but as it turned out, the Fatherland wasn't proud of him. Just 13 years after he showed me how to play marbles and sit correctly on a horse, Siegfried and the whole Ermann family were gassed in Auschwitz for being Jewish ...

Y yo no tendré miedo de morenas ni rubias, pues cerraré los ojos y te diré: soy tuya.

Entonces hablo para sentir que existo, porque si no hablara mi lengua se paralizaría, mi corazón dejaría de latir, toda yo me secaría deslumbrada.

Me salí de mi carne, gocé el goce más alto: oponer una frase de basalto al genio oscuro que nos desintegra.

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.

Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination.

The mind is the reality. You are what you think.