Quotes About Identity

When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, 'why didn't you discover the cure for such and such? why didn't you become the Messiah?' The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is 'why didn't you become you?

One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

All her life, Claire had had a problem figuring out where other people ended and she began. All her life, she'd taken on the world's hurt; she held herself responsible. But why?

Just be aware that what you achieve doesn't matter as much as what kind of person you are

It's not a house to us. It's a home. And it's not a home, it's s way of life. Our summertime happens here. This house is part of our past, it's our present, it'll be our future. It's who we are.

It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel; they didn't want Jews; we were Jews. (The Inn at Lake Devine)

I hadn't known up to that moment that I had a surname that was recognizably Jewish, or that people named Marx would be unwelcome somewhere in the United States because of it.

The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

One polite fellow asked her where she was from. She told him from New York State. Why, he asked, do New Yorkers always say State? Why, because, she answered,—and her eyes were big with surprise,—no one would want to say they were from New York City.

Humans are animals, too, you know.

How much of who I am is defined by the world around me, and how much is something more innate?

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.

Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being thought a man, or else he thinks that he can make himself better than God made him.

The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman.

What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpents offer and had said to him instead, Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be -- let me be a woman?

The woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling which bears her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.

so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts...

The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls--their looks, their clothes, their social life--do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.

I don't want anybody treating me as a "person" rather than as a woman. Our sexual differences are the terms of our life, and to obscure them in any way is to weaken the very fabric of life itself. When they are lost, we are lost.

you are worthy and lovable, just as you are, on your own.

A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.

I remove my wedding rings and put them in the jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.

Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.