Quotes About Identity

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare.

that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

old. I had been trained to believe that a woman was supposed to have children by her mid-thirties—or at least that she was supposed to want them. And if you didn't follow that path, what kind of woman were you? Desiccated, tired, useless. Sexless. A spinster. A hag. An old bag. An old maid. Old.

They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscate my identity; but he always does that. Then loneliness starts interrogating me, which I dread because it always goes on for hours.

We can change our wives. We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team

it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection

I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life–so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one.

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword.

Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philosopher, said, "The wise man is always similar to himself.

But I was supposed to want to have a baby.

El amor desesperado consiste en inventarse un personaje, exigir a la persona amada que lo represente y hundirnos en la miseria cuando se niega a convertirse en ese ser de ficción.

We humans come into this world - as Aristophanes so beautifully explained - feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.)

did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn't seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn't believe that it made me bad.

I have never loved the people I was supposed to love, Angela.

But a lot of people don't know exactly what their passion is, or they may have multiple passions, or they may be going through a midlife change of passion—all of which can leave them feeling confused and blocked and insecure.

All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.

From her mother, Janie learned to play charades and murder in the dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee's call was Drink your tea!; Bea said it was Brush your teeth!), and tell prairie warblers from the maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls.

The skull is not broken, or only a little, here. He doesn't actually know it's a female, but he wants it to be. Female and a mother, old, died of natural causes. And somewhere in the sea, her young, no longer young. Their young.

To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.

You may find that when you try to live in two worlds you are at home in neither of them.

This is who I am, Séraphine. Naked, with blade and blood. I am vengeance. I am hate. I am sin personified. Never mistake me for the hero of this tale, for I am not and shall never be. I am the villain.

If I've never stepped outside the role that's been assigned to me since birth, I've never tested myself. I've been too afraid of others' opinions, I think. I've been a coward. If that woman needs me, why not help her - for her... and for me?