Quotes About Identity

Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists.

The heart itself cannot break, for its very nature is soft and open. What breaks open when we see things as they are is the protective shell of ego identity we have built around ourselves in order to avoid feeling pain. When the heart breaks out of this shell, we feel quite raw and vulnerable. Yet that is also the beginning of feeling real compassion for ourselves and others. —John Welwood Ordinary Magic

Our identity is like a kaleidoscope. With each turn we reset it not to a former or final state but to a new one that reflects the here-and-now positions of the pieces we have to work with. The design is always new because the shifts are continual. That is what makes kaleidoscopes, and us, so appealing and beautiful.

We are born with inalienable emotional needs for love, safety, acceptance, freedom, attention, validation of our feelings, and physical holding. Healthy identity is based on the fulfillment of these needs.

Though most of us want to move on from our past, we tend to go through our lives simply casting new people into the roles of key people, such as our parents or any significant person with whom there is still unfinished business.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Besides, she likes Judy Garland and knows that if she sings a Judy Garland song, she's gonna sing it better than Judy ever could. That gives Aretha great satisfaction.

Feeling inadequate has always been my biggest problem.

The good news can be summarized in this way. You are far worse than you think you are, and you are more loved than you ever imagined you could be. Jesus came to show us both.

Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

in California everyone wants to know what kind of car you drive. In the South it's which church you attend. And here it's what kind of dog you have.

A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising.

Well, it's nice to meet you. My name is Mr. Saint Paul.

Reminds me of a joke. A cowboy lost his Bible in the desert. A couple of months later a cow wanders over with a book in its mouth. The cowboy takes the book—it's his lost Bible. 'What a miracle; praise the Lord!' the cowboy exclaims. 'Not really,' says the cow. 'Your name is on the inside cover.

Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre—Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.

Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it "a national character, an identity" creating "a new moral American continent" without which the physical one was "a carcass, a bloat.

Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

Likewise, India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu are fundamentally the same tongue, only using Devanagari script in India, Arabic letters in Pakistan. And Yiddish, while not exactly German, is closely akin to it. Yet Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, and German in Roman ones.

It doesn't mean that you have so much money coming in you don't have to work anymore. It means having the freedom to do what you really want in life, and the freedom to be the person you are striving to be. What

With the success of the last three or so years, when a lot of people start treating you differently, there's a danger that you may start to think of yourself differently. You rely on your friends to say, 'Hey, wake up!'

Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.