Quotes About Identity

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up. ...

the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.

In one of them I am sixteen or seventeen years old. I am wearing, under a jacket of the Assistance Publique, a torn sweater. My face is an oval, very pure; my nose is smashed, flattened by a punch in some forgotten fight. The look on my face is blasé, sad and warm, very serious. My hair was thick and unruly. Seeing myself at that age, I expressed my feelings almost aloud: "Poor little fellow, you've suffered.

In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.

I love you as if you were in my belly. You're not my sweetheart, you're myself. My heart or my sex. A branch of me.

Faggots are the great immoralists.

when Divine seeks out the lost Alberto, she tries to portray him on herself and invents his smile with her own mouth. She puckers her muscles in what she thinks is the right way, the way–so she thinks when she feels her mouth twisting–that makes her resemble Alberto, until the day it occurs to her to do it in front of a mirror, and she realizes that her grimaces in no way resemble the smile we have already called starlike.)

Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual

O que é que tu tens? Agora já podes parecer contigo. Retoma teu rosto. Vamos, Claire, volta a ser minha irmã...

She was in Spain, I believe. Kids were chasing her and screaming 'Maricona' and throwing stones at her.

Un mâle qui en baise un autre est un double mâle

Als er iets mis gaat, (...) gaat mijn geest, zodra ik, maar even de tijd krijg, (...), aan het werk om mij de al te wrede werkelijkheid te maskeren. Zo snel mogelijk maak ik voor mezelf een wereld waarin ik hofjonker ben, prins, koning of scheepsjongen (...). Het is alsof een handle wordt overgehaald en een valluik zich opent, waardoor ik in een fantasiewereld stort die wraak neemt. (...) het kan ook zijn dat in het dromen mijn roeping ligt.

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.

He called his horse Bicou, he called the child Bicou, and to hell with it.

On ne se refait pas; il faut s'utiliser tel qu'on est. Ça ne s'adapte pas toujours. De là les peines.

I will take refuge in my real country. My country, my France, is a France that cannot be invaded.

1. Once again, my country, that country which is only an idea has not been invaded and never will be. 2. Pétain is not France. Pétain and Laval do not speak for us. Their word does not commit us to anything and cannot dishonor us. 3. The only right way to gauge this event must be in terms of the world. In the world, France has not been defeated.

Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized.

Nobody else gets to live your life.

We can never see our own faces directly, never look straight into our own eyes.

Guys were first effigies, then urchins. But always male