Quotes About Identity

History repeats itself. Someone says this. History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of, I know history. There are many names in history... but none of them are ours.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

You are playing cards with three Jeffs. One is your father, one is your brother, and the other is your current boyfriend. All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep. Your boyfriend Jeff gets up to answer the phone. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

Personally, I'm a mess of conflicting impulses—I'm independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.

Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem.

They are the same and they are not the same. They are the same and they hate each other for it.

Anyone can paint a mask. It's boring. And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.

To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself.

Your name like two X's like punched-in eyes, like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter, your name with two X's to mark the spots, to hold the place, to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost.

but you still can't get beyond your skin

I've seen your true face: the back of your head. If you were walking away, keep walking.

You just wanted to play in your own backyard, but you don't know where your own yard is, exactly.

Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future.

his skin barely keeping him inside.

you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do

You asked me once, What are we made of? Well, these are the things we're made of. One house, two house. The road goes away from here.

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing, names that no one's ever able to figure out.