Quotes About Identity

She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself.

Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.

Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.

Por otra parte, ese fenómeno se ve reforzado por el deseo de la gente de mostrar a los demás o a sí mismos que son «gente de bien»; nuestro altruismo no es totalmente puro, sino que está motivado en parte por nuestro deseo de aparentar, de labrarnos una buena imagen social y personal.

I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race. I am of no specific region. I am of earth. I am of no particular class. I am of the human class, preparing a new class. I am neither male nor female nor in-between. I am of sex, with male differentiations. I am of no special field. I am of the field of being.

It was so hard to decide where loyalties should lie: with oneself or with one's community?

All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs. We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.

Do not worry, Mummy. Jesus loves me as I am." I imagine that the little boy thought: Jesus loves me as I am. I do not have to be different from what I am. I do not have to be what my uncle wants me to be. I do not have to be what mummy would have wanted me to be. I do not even have to be what I would have liked to be. Jesus does not care about my disability.

In a relationship of communion, you are you and I am I; I have my identity and you have yours. I must be myself and you must be yourself. We are called to grow together, each one becoming more fully himself or herself. Communion, in fact, gives the freedom to grow. It is not possessiveness. It entails a deep listening to others, helping them to become more fully themselves.

I have an evening dress, pink mull over silk (I'm perfectly beautiful in that), and a blue church dress, and a dinner dress of red veiling with Oriental trimming (makes me look like a Gipsy), and another of rose-coloured challis, and a grey street suit, and an every-day dress for classes. That wouldn't be an awfully big wardrobe for Julia Rutledge Pendleton, perhaps, but for Jerusha Abbott - Oh, my!

The feeling often comes over me that I am not at all remarkable; it is fun to plan a career, but in all probability I shan't turn out a bit different from any other ordinary person.

Scratch an Irishman and he'll bleed a story.

I feel as though I have gotten ahead of myself somewhat. All stories are about family, even those that pretend not to be. So I should tell you about mine.

Juan Manuel María de la Aurora Fernández Pacheco Acuña Girón y Portocarrero (1650–1726)—the

some reason the French love to laugh at Belgians. Belgian jokes are like Newfie jokes in Canada or Vermont jokes in New England (we can testify that the same cookie-cutter stories circulate freely between languages).

Ce n'est pas une autobiographie qu'on devrait écrire mais dix, mais cent, car, si nous n'avons qu'une vie, nous disposons d'innombrables manières de (nous) la raconter.

n'ai obéi qu'à une exigence, d'ailleurs non formulée, celle de donner à entendre ma voix, et cela, si je puis dire, à mes propres oreilles : ma voix, comme si je craignais, après tant d'années consacrées à écouter les voix des autres, de perdre la mienne

Alain Veynerdi zafer kazanm?? bir komutan edas?yla Anna'ya bakt?. O an hayat?n?n en mutlu an? olmal?yd?: –Han?mefendi, bundan önceki hayat?n?zda siz bir Türk'tünüz.

But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.

Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself 'I am an overcoat' just because he happened to be wearing one?

In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.

After that, we weren't the same anymore. We'd become men. Disillusioned and cynical. Slightly bitter too. We had nothing. We hadn't even learned a trade. No future. Nothing but life. But life without a future is worse than no life at all.

Il mediterraneo non è solo geografia. Non è solo storia. Ma è più di una semplice appartenenza.