Quotes About Identity

Because of Warhol, we were no longer freaks, outside society. It's really partly because of Warhol that I can now get angry when people treat me as an outsider, as in Brisbane char Nicholas Zurbrugg, tattooed and pierced, because of Warhol (to begin with) I don't even have to think to reply, if you think chat, you're the freak. I am society as much as you.

You are only able to love in the first place if you love yourself, if you believe in yourself, if you know yourself. Only then can you approach the other.… Love can only come if you are clear about who you are.

Simone de Beauvoir: The day when it will become possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger.

I was also working on the question: Why hadn't I extricated myself sooner? Why had I not reacted for so long? Why couldn't I give up the idea sooner of marriage and at least entertained the possibility of being on my own sooner? The version of myself who was worrying about the correct way to press the elevator button was not actually me, so why had I allowed her to exist and walk around and go to playgrounds and sit in libraries and shop for dinner for so long?

Doris Lessing: You only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self, and your appearance when you get a bit older...a whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize that what in fact you've been using to get attention has been what you look like...it really is a most salutary and fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all.

Ever since childhood, I've felt a tension between who I think I should be-- smarter, more confident, more creative, more adventurous, more out going- and who I am: quiet, introspective, sensitive, and solitary. If I could only be better, I think- a better wife, a better mother, a better writer, a better human- then I would feel more sure of myself and more worthy. More deserving of life.

How easy it is to miss the gift of who we are, because we're so busy trying to become somebody else. Maybe all I really need to do- all anyone needs to do- is trust in what we love and continue to do that.

I was so busy trying to figure out what I should be doing that I couldn't see the truth: All I really needed to do was focus on who I wanted to be. Love is the gift I've had to offer all along, in all its different forms. I just didn't ever quite believe that it-or I- was enough.

But...If that's true, then you're not...we thought you...Akira?

sitting in church doesn't make me a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes me a car

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.

You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but you will be soon,' but you know you won't.

I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling.

Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.

Do we risk making the world a blander, more homogenized place if we get rid of the genes for manic-depressive illness

I can't think, I can't calm this murderous cauldron, my grand ideas of an hour ago seem absurd and pathetic, my life is in ruins and - worse still - ruinous; my body is uninhabitable. It is raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok. In the mirror I see a creature I don't know but must live with and share my mind with. I understand why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely.

He was twenty years old when he left New England. By the age of thirty he had exchanged Protestantism for Catholicism, anonymity for literary acclaim, and sanity for madness.

The Self Is Not Portable The self is not portable. It cannot be packed. It comes sneaking back to any place from which it's been extracted, for it is nothing alone. It is not an entity. The ratio of self to home: one part in seventy.

My daddy is a mistake for a person.

You need to remember that. If you're to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory...

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.