Quotes About Identity

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy: a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

By definition, soul evades the cage of definition. It is the indefinable essence of a person's spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress.

Cavanaugh says to be constantly describing yourself and to think you know who you are and to be constantly explaining to others is a gospel of despair. To be yourself and to put yourself in conversation with others and to overhear yourself saying things you didn't know you knew, this is more like the truth, this is more like the poetic imagination … and the weakness of the prose, according to Cavanaugh, is the person who tries to get to a given goal in a staight line.

In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.

A lost person or article is still what it is, still valuable in itself, but in the wrong place, disconnected from its purpose and unable to be or do whatever it is intended to be or do.

It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I'm fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat.

When the Hawaiians appeared at Frontier Park, the audience and other cowboys paused to take them in: ornate leather chaps, long rawhide lariats, flowers around their hats, and dark skin—they were different in every way. To locals and tourists in Cheyenne, the paniolo were not just odd; they were interlopers.

Shlomo Carlebach used to say, if he meets a student who says he is a Protestant, he knows he is a Protestant; if he meets a student who says he is a Catholic, he knows he is a Catholic. If he meets a student who says he is a human being, he knows he is a Jew.

The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.

John, let me make one thing clear," Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. "Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis' penis would be larger than your penis."..... ..."Fuck all of you," John retorted. "You don't even exist. We're all just a figment of my cock's imagination.

She said, "Why do you, like, hate yourself?" "If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It'll be time to start a Web site soon, where you'll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

No, I don't, like, play an instrument or anything.I'm just...well, you saw me at the beginning there. I was the guy that fell down and died.

He had braces, sported a black Limp Bizkit Tshirt. Limp Bizkit is a band that was popular at the time. If you're fortunate, you've never heard of them.

Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.

John jolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.

I bet his real name is Chad, he looks like one.

We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such.