Quotes About Identity

No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.

It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she's not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we're all wondering the same thing: I'm still me; are you still you? A

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.

This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.

Men were ever men.

All these small things are the glue that keeps you bound to your own life. They are the things that make you you. And in that respect, they are not little at all. They are huge. They are grand.

Everybody always forgets that you die the way you live. She will keep on being herself until the end.

Because my mother is a third base.

Life is funny, isn't it? Funny in the way you can never predict not only what will happen, but who you'll become.

we) laughed. It was so good to laugh. I felt as though I too were reentering my legitimate self.

It seems like you always are the way you are right now, unless you are a movie star, when people always see you the way you were best.

In a way, it is as if your refusal to forgive is too much a part of you for you to lose it. Who would you be without it? Not yourself.

I was not like other kids, as my mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell Photoplay, too. To their great admiration, I was sure.

There were no formulas to account for the idiosyncratic yearnings of a human heart, no ways to extract from someone feelings that lived as matter-of-factly as blood and bones inside of him. In the end, Griffin thought, we are only who we are.

He says the only way to know yourself is to challenge yourself - in a hard way, so that you're really scared. He says what you do in times like that is what you are.

That's really important in trying to understand shibui. It sounds simple, like a cliché, really; but it's true: a woman is most beautiful when she is herself.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

The problem for me is that I can't ever really see who Gregory is, any more than I can see what a mirror by itself looks like, because he reflects whoever's around him.

You're not a frog; you're a toad

Gradually people began to speak of the place as Amberside, though there were a few diehards who never stopped calling it Villa Caprice, or, as in the case of Eli Scaynes, the Villa Cay-priss. But Julian and Joe and Tom and Lucy and Davey never called it anything but the Blake's house; and Portia and Foster never called it anything but home. All their lives they knew that one of the best things that ever happened to them was to be able to call it that.