Quotes About Identity

There are people who will try to make you choose between who you are and who they want you to be. You have to watch out for those people.

That's what happens when people take away their love, Bea. It makes you smaller. Sometimes, it makes you disappear.

Sometimes your body feels like a cage for all the stuff inside. You paint your nails, braid your hair, and buy the right kind of jeans, but none of it is really about you.

Sheila made it sound simple, like everyone had one real self. But what if I didn't? Or what if my real self was no good? I kept imagining Angelica's face, half like usual, half not working right. Sometimes I felt like that on the inside, like I knew how I wanted to be, but it didn't match up with how I really was.

It's about the kind of love that doesn't ask you to be anyone but who you are.

That's not what I mean. A lot of people make bad mistakes. But being in jail can make them feel like a mistake is all they are. Like they aren't even people anymore." Her bringing the chips and cookies

I've thought a lot about those veils. I wonder if, every once in a while, someone is born without one.

I wanted to be good, but I wasn't sure if I WAS good or if I just wanted Dad and Aunt Ess and everyone to SEE me being good.

That's what happens when people take away their love, Bea. It makes you smaller. Sometimes it makes you disappear" -Sheila

The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

She complained there was no 'café au lait'-colored construction paper for her skin, or 'sixty-percent-cacao-chocolate' color for her eyes. I remember staring at her while these words came out of her mouth, and thinking, Your skin is light brown. Your eyes are dark brown. Why don't you just use brown, you idiot? Jay Stringer didn't complain about the paper, and neither did any of the other ten kids using brown.

Simmy entertained slippery thoughts about identity and the meaning of any individual's span on earth. When it came right down to it, she supposed that all a person really amounted to was the sum of their memories.

We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood....After a long history during which living solo would get you labeled a pathetic spinster or, if you were lucky, a sexual iconoclast, being recognized as an independent person rather than as someone's daughter, wife, or mother is a new, shiny kind of liberty for women, one that has unlocked all sorts of doors.

It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.

This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are "allowed" to tell as people of colour.

What does my smile look like now? Vivi wondered. Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it, that's it?

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

Culture can be invisible to its natives.