Quotes About Identity

Her papa called her 'chiacchere' because he said she chattered away all day, just like a magpie. He had all sorts of funny names for her: 'fiorellina', my little flower; 'abelie', which meant honeysuckle; and 'topolina', my sweet little mouse. Margherita's mother only called her 'piccolina', my little one, or 'mia cara Margherita,' my darling daisy.

Margherita's father always said a person only truly revealed themselves when in disguise.

Life is just a process to figure out who we are.

Don't think you're of little importance, you're somebody,somebody fine. However you tumble and get up and stumble, you're part of a vision devine

The name's Giddiopeus." "I'm Trotteus

what do I deserve? Sylvia contests. Why is the woman always expected to give up on life? She's a writer, not a teacher. She can; she does. She is the arrow, not him, nor him, nor him, these men who would have her be charming and quiet, reciting the names of insects in Latin, stirring something at a stove.

We are who we are, because of those we choose to love and because of those who love us.

Aber nachdem so viele auf dieselbe Art gebrandmarkt worden waren, wurde es zum Symbol eines guten Charaktern. Ein Ehrenzeichen. Ja.

My self and my other selves, both past and yet to come, were equally present.

He was a stranger here too; he noticed his accent had softened and his expectations of people had hardened.

To have been always what I am; and so changed from what I was

Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one

Iago says, I am not what I am, and for this he is called deceitful, a villain. Odd, isn't it? I have always found him to be the most truthful of Shakespeare's creations. We are none of us who we are.

Your DNA is not you. It is more like the basic instructions for you. DNA is to a person as a blueprint is to a house.

Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.

What can that mean except that women's sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will?

She has told me that what she found most destructive about minority-group psychology "is that one comes to share the conviction of the majority: that one is less able, less intelligent, less educable, less worthy of responsibility." My sentiments, exactly.

You can't change the music of your soul. —In Esquire, 1967

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. There

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hop toads behind me are silent. I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. (20)

I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter.

I have an insidious conviction that between the onset of puberty and the age of thirty, people, like the hypothetical painting in the desert, do no exist without someone looking at them. I didn't. After thirty, I suppose we become a corporeal composite of what all of our viewers have witnessed, a kind of community gelatin.