Quotes About Identity

The Renaissance idea of individualism never penetrated Africa like it did Europe and America. The African model of leadership is better expressed as ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others.

Just as pretending to be brave can become real courage, we may find that outfitting ourselves as the person we want to be brings us closer to becoming that person.

You're a gay detective? I don't think I've ever met one before." "Of course you have," McWhirter put in emphatically. "You just didn't know they were gay. That's the whole point.

Asian Americans, like Native Americans, are not evenly distributed across the United States. To lump these people together ignores the sharp differences between them. Any examination of Asian Americans quickly reveals their diversity, which will be apparent as we focus on individual Asian American groups, beginning with Asian Indians.

The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth, what they produced, how they produced it," Ng?g? wa Thiong'o sees the way that control was introduced and managed was to deconstruct the people's sense of self and replace it with that of the colonizer. This would occur when a people's perception of themselves and their world was overthrown.

The moral contradictions of our ancestry should not prevent us from reaching a realistic assessment of who we are. When we do that, high hopes are still possible.

She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories.

I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are.

I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.

That open country is so huge you can feel lost and abandoned in it or you can work to feel a part of it, like ya belong to it and it belongs to you. Like a part of you is rock and stone and stream and all the open sky. Ya get past lonesome then...them creatures is all my family and i'm family to them as well.

I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us.

ya prove who ya are in the day yer in.

Ils ont refusé de me laisser être juste un hockeyeur. Pour eux, je serais toujours un indien.

All that we are is story...It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.

Late in the evenings I'd walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.

And me, well, I have to confess that I liked them all too, but maybe leaned more in favour of those types of stories that reached inside of you, touched something that you hadn't touched for a long time, and reminded you of the soft moments where you really came to be who you are. Spoken by Amelia One For The Road (a fictional character in Ragged Company) about the movies she'd seen.

Amid the slaps and pokes and guffaws that greeted them, I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are. I became drunk with that.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

materialism takes root in early childhood, and is driven mainly by low self-esteem.26

If we had been allowed to participate in the vital processes of America's national growth, what would have been the textures of our lives, the pattern of our traditions, the routine of our customs, the state of our arts, the code of our laws, the function of our government!… We black folk say that America would have been stronger and greater.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.