Quotes About Identity

Surrendering is not repressing your personality. God wants to use your unique personality. Rather than its being diminished, surrendering enhances it. C. S. Lewis observed, "The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become — because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Henri Nouwen said, "In order to be of service to others we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others…. thus we become free to be compassionate." When you base your worth and identity on your relationship to Christ, you are freed from the expectations of others, and that allows you to really serve them best.

A young man in his twenties wrote, "I feel like a failure because I'm struggling to become something, and I don't even know what it is. All I know how to do is to get by. Someday, if I discover my purpose, I'll feel I'm beginning to live.

Your value doesn't come from the clothes you wear, a number on a scale, your career, or your success with a health plan on any given day. You are of immense value because God made you.

We often confuse our identity with our habits, but the truth is, habits can be changed! Habits are things you do. They are not who you are! You have weaknesses, but you are not your weaknesses. You are a unique creation of God, flawed by your nature and choices, yet deeply loved by God. No man or woman will ever love you as much as God does. His love for you is not dependent on your habits.

I'm always so glad, Sylvie murmured, that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.

Every guy you saw these days had shaved away his male-pattern baldness in a futile attempt to look hard rather than merely hairless.

Maybe we're all the living dead, reconstituted from the dust of the dead.

I'm a shadow of my former self, she announces. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she's a shadow of a shadow.

Louise's possessions looked like a refugee's beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA.

Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.

Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love.

She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.

They were both Filipino and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there?

Once upon a time Jackson had erased his past, now his past had erased him.

Pamela wanted to die with her own hips and her own teeth; beyond that she didn't have much of a goal.

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

Freda had overheard Cissy telling Gladys that Freda was "a show-off brat." She had been wounded by her sister's judgement on her character. I am not a brat, merely unusually confident, she thought

a birthmark the shape of Africa.

Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn't really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

I don't understand." "Well, when you arrived at St. George's you wouldn't stop screaming. They thought something terrible must have happened to you." "This isn't St. George's, is it?" "No," he said kindly. "This is a private clinic. Rest, good food and so on. They have lovely gardens. I always think a lovely garden helps, don't you?

Their parts were fixed—Graham was the villain, Ewan took the role of worthy leading man, Nick was his long-suffering sidekick, and Emily was forever the adolescent ingenue, the moody daughter whose life had been blighted by everyone else (apparently). Gloria herself was offstage, playing the woman in the kitchen.

Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree.