Quotes About Identity

I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

And then I think of the Velvet Underground's doleful song Jesus, from their third and least renowned or appreciated album. It is my favorite. Jesus / Help me find my proper place / Help me in my weakness / 'Cause I'm falling out of grace. The only words in the song, repeated repeatedly, composed by Lou Reed, a Jew. You see, in the hour of darkness, it is easier to turn to the Son of God than to God Himself, for some reason. I'm not sure why.

I was completely wrapped up in a person who didn't know me at all, like a claustrophobe who chose to live in a small dark cave, trying to whip the fear.

Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can't be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.

Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.

I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else's toy, but I didn't have it in me.

At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.

Negaliu pak?sti minties, kad asmenyb?s raid? ir vis? individuali? savybi? rinkin? galima paaiškinti paprastai tokie buvo laikai.

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic—I was the attic itself.

The idea of throwing away my depression, of having to create a whole personality, a whole way of living and being that did not contain misery as its leitmotif, was daunting.

some say that the difference between catholic guilt and jewish guilt is that the former emanates from the knowledge that we are all born already fallen, that there is nothing we can ever do to overcome the original sin; the latter springs from a sense that every one of us was created in god's image and has the potential for perfection. so catholic guilt is about impossibility, while jewish guilt is about an abundance of possibility.

I'm a stranger wherever I go because I'm strange to myself. My mind just goes off doing its own thing, never consulting me at all about whether it's all right to feel this way or that.

When would I stop wondering what right—what nerve—I had to be depressed? Enough with this going on about all my blessings. I was starting to sound like a character in a TV movie with a title like The Best Little Girl in the World or Most Likely to Succeed.

But why should I cast myself in the ancient female part of victim of men's plots and passions?

You come from the country?" "You know that." "No," said Theron. "I thought you'd sprung full-grown from the University clock tower.

Be careful to know yourself when the time comes," he warned the Little King. "The man who fails the test will run for the rest of his life, with the beast still in his heart.

What's your name?" I ask. I'm expecting something different from what we usually get down here in Soho, newbie runaways styling themselves Shadesong or Spartacus or whatever. But

Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. "Without mystery life shrinks," wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. "The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.

The word "autistic" is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character—unless they or we let it.

In a widely read New York Times article in December 2004, Jack Thomas, a tenth grader with Asperger's syndrome, got the world's attention by stating, "We don't have a disease, so we can't be cured. This is just the way we are.

My autism is part of who I am, not all of who I am.

I can write about images from my own childhood for children today. I wasn't sure I could do this, but there was no way out; I had to use the images from my own childhood, because the child I was is the only child I really know.

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything? Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.