Quotes About Identity

They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer...

The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

And yet, places remember what people forget.

IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi's Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard.

People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us!

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

inhabit that place. Wherever

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston?

Identity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists." "Or: Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

There are so many names for the thing that everyone is scared to death of, and everyone wants to tell you theirs.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.

The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they're forced to share.

people see better what looks like them.

the country's bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They'd become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.

We only see things that look like us.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

Neelay, please

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.