Quotes About Identity

If you spend enough time reading someone else's thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call 'you'.

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

Everybody is wearing a mask. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.

The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.

Just what are women, exactly? Should men be classed in the same species as women? Why are they so different? Books and films may say it is better to be a woman, but I cannot believe it. I have never felt it to be true, and I never will.

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, "Find your left eye," I suppose it would be difficult to do so.

In years past, I had carefully studied the stems, leaves, and branches and had read the tags that identified the different varieties, but I realized now that I was already unable to remember what this thing called a rose had looked like.

The real me is disappearing as we speak. Slowly but surely being sucked into thin air.

When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself.

Now he longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called "individuality

Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called "individuality.

Writing an autobiography means guessing or making up everything you've forgotten. I thought I'd already sufficiently described the character Ivan. In reality, I could no longer even remember him. Or rather: I was starting to remember him all too clearly, which could only mean this Ivan was now nothing more than my creation.

Locked in my invisible cage, I am living proof of human rights violations, and I'm not even human

I instantly recognized his true masculinity in the fact that he had no cavities.

Considering that less than 4 percent of the world's population are immigrants (living in a country they were not born in), the assumption that one's life chances are independent of one's country of origin is deceptive

No wonder religious fundamentalism and extreme right-wing nationalism simultaneously reappear.

As children, we played hide and seek with one another, as adults with ourselves.

We all have handicaps. The difference is that some of us must reveal ours, while others must conceal theirs, to be treated with mercy.

We are all pretty determined people, And like Americans tend to look at the place we live in as not only a place but also an idea we live in.

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?