Quotes About Identity

It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.

Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.

You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.

A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart.

A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as feisty; we are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together...Layers, by their nature, are fragile things.

A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure.

If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i'm the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me.

They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

So if your life truths have to be protected the same way some people keep their couches in plastic, then ciao. Have a nice life. If we bump into each other at Target, I'm the one buying the sour gummy worms, and that's all you need to know about me.

We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.

Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you've got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.

There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens.

we are all a volume on the shelf of the... library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands.

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.

Usually you just walk and walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are, in a place that feels familiar and known.

When it comes to sisters, it seems one stays and one goes, one remains bound and the other is set free. She is who she is in good part because of who Gloria isn't. In order to be herself, in order to be different from her sister, she had to take what was left over, the opposite, unchosen road. She is both glad and furious about it.

Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.

Once again, I am translucent. I could break against rocks. I am ten thousand miles down and ten thousand miles across and around and it's too far and too long and too deep, but there is no black-haired body with wide, soft brown eyes looking into mine and seeing exactly who I am.

There. But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little.

people bring their same selves to every situation, to all their relationships.

I don't stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely.

Nash knows what it means to give your favorite books- it's like handing over a piece of yourself and asking the person to understand it, maybe even treasure it.

Knowing your full true story, telling your full true story, living your full true story--it seems like the most basic right of every human being.