Quotes About Identity

I want to know who I am and accept every part of that identity. I am frightened and I am fearless. I am weak and a warrior. I am uncertain and I am confident. And by learning to embrace the paradox in all of it, I am more myself.

We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others' ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots, but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible, even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that, after handing over our power piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.

To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.

My boyfriend calls me 'princess', but I think of myself more along the lines of 'monkey' and 'retard'.

I'd die if I was Madonna. I'd die. God, what a horrible way to live. And Michael Jackson! To be so famous and to feel so isolated. I feel so bad for them. I don't know how it feels, and I hope it never happens to me.

and my friend Karen remembers as a little girl studying Hebrew she inquired of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard and said in Yiddish "if there is a god or if there isn't a god a Jew studies"--isn't that a good story beloved, but the woman in me says that the poet lies the poet can afford to lie

At a certain moment, women in cultures that glamorize their images and suffocate their minds, that set them on pedestals while requiring their silence and modesty, cease to be either silent or modest.

Acting is magical. Change your look and your attitude, and you can be anyone.

Se quitó el 'de' de su apellido de casada y lo tiró por encima del hombro. Al caer, el 'de' produjo un estallido de cacerolas de aluminio rodando por las escaleras de la casa: pram pata pram porque la mujer no es propiedad de nadie, ni siquiera del marido pram pram.

Transpiro... Me toco. Siento que mis manos ya no son mis manos... Mi piel ya no es mi piel... Me encuentro en un estado rarísimo.. como si rozara la realidad, pero no pudiendo permanecer dentro de ella. Como si mi persona no estuviese allí, en ese lugar.

Objectification is the female equivalent of emasculation.

She'd assumed the prince was for show, and the frog was their true nature being revealed. What if they actually were Princes? And something I did changed them?

Mijn haar... dat is Alice' haar! Ik weet het zeker. Maar hoe... hoe zijn ze daaraan gekomen? William moet een lok hebben afgeknipt en hem hebben bewaard...

Ze hoeft alleen maar haar bril af te zetten en de aardige Claire Norton verandert in haar verbazingwekkende alter ego: de Blinde Vink! - Claire

Political is personal; personal is political. I never was a political person until I realized I was a lesbian. I was this oblivious middle-class white kid who didn't understand the powers of oppression or structure or anything. My very existence became politicized for me and that's what enabled me to see all these things. It wasn't just me, it was a whole cultural movement that was also doing those things that I was a part of.

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.

At the danger of waxing nostalgic about the 'old days,' I don't want to be like everyone else. I want acceptance, but I want acceptance of my difference, not my sameness. It's a funny contract. The cultural machine wants to chew everyone up and turn them into this uniform little substance.

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

Leaving home but going back home: once you crossed the ocean you were always on the wrong side. That was the lot of the immigrant, belonging everywhere but nowhere. Displaced, and unplaced.

Cadvan smiled. "We are all many," he said. "But most of us don't have the privilege of understanding that as clearly as you do. It is hard to know oneself, but until we do, we cannot know why we act as we do. It's a lifetime's quest, and it never ends.

They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere.

I am what I am, all the things that have happened to me, all the things I have ever learned, as well as all the things that were born inside me.