Quotes About Identity

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn't get used to it.

Even a prince may be a fool

For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.

Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.

Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.

The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen.

She jerked to life, her eyes wide open. "Why did that woman give me away?" Then it all began to pour out. Why had she been given away? We'd never told her she was a foundling.

for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it. Because Mrs. Myers had helped him already by understanding that he would never forget Leslie. He thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing—a stupid, weird little kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow

all my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that's why I was long resigned to my failure to publish.

He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.

I was stolen from my family by Navajo raiders when I was fourteen, and taken in by a Navajo family who had lost a daughter of their own." Josefina

Everyone had a place. Everyone fit. Everyone belonged. Everyone but Anna Mae.

Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

I compensated for my athletic deficiency with an upright bearing and an impeccable style of dress that earned me the nickname "the Count"—one bestowed with affection, as I was good-humored about my own foibles.

No one quite believed that freelancing and being a mother qualified as actual work.

I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less than human.

thought of that image as I was looking across the table at Max, at him looking back at me, old me, much older me: fifty-six. Max was born in 1906 and thus had always been—would always be—younger than I, by six years if I lied about my age, as I always did, or by seven if I was honest, which I was only in the privacy of my mind.

Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it's possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am.

No one who'd actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn't matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories.