Quotes About Identity

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

All of us, regardless of how we identify, need a community in which to grow our faith. We require the tangle of other souls to enlarge our hearts, to perfect our relationships with one another and to help us understand more deeply our better Selves (big 'S').

I always had short hair, and I hated my short hair. I was always mistaken for a boy, but my mom wouldn't let me change my hair because she was always chasing me around with a hairbrush, and it was always tangled, so she just would cut it off, and she's right: short hair did suit me.

I'm nothing if not a tangled, colorful ball of contradictions.

You get tangled up in your own ego of how you're perceived. You can lose your way.

My identity was tangled up in the parts that I had played since I was a child. I would go through my closet and only see audition clothes: Brie looking older, Brie looking '60s, Brie looking '40s, Brie looking younger in the future.

People very rarely know my real name but recognise me as characters from my shows, such as 'Last Tango In Halifax.'

Chris Nolan can put Batman in full body armor, have him drive a car that looks likes a tank, and make him political, and everyone says, 'Oh, that's OK.' But try making him Filipino, and everyone gets mad.

When I was at school when I was 16, I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army - I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely - or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army, and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist.

I went through phases of odd hairstyles and tank top-over-tee outfits and stuff like that.

When I first agreed to do 'Shark Tank,' they asked me to wear a suit, and I was just like, 'No. I can't. It'll end my career.'

When I was working with Reebok, Paul Fineman sent me to see David Stern to try to explain to him, basically, the tanning of America: That all rappers wanted to be basketball players and basketball players wanted to be rappers.

And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was.ï¾  There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon.ï¾ 

You are someone and you have a right to your life.

There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.

If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.

Language is powerful. What we say can shape how we think—and it certainly shapes how others think about us. In this regard, calling the business a "customer" simply conveys the idea that IT is not part of the business.

Page 10: The typical overseas Chinese, it is true, has often a sense of his own cultural superiority over the alien people among whom he lives.

The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.

The village barber shaves those and only those men who live in the village and do not shave themselves. The village barber is a man and he lives in the village. Consider the question "Who shaves the barber?

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

We come from a place that has always been inside us. Our words migrate helplessly. The world reflects only itself. Which is why we have to create our own memories.

There is always another heart within the heart, for / what we own is never what we have, what we love / is never what we own — Richard Jackson, from "Francis' Prayer," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

When do you realize the selves you left behind have gone on without you, living the many lives you now begin to resemble?