Quotes About Identity

Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn't my life anymore. It was someone else's. And I had decided that I'd just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.

Don't you see? The things we once loved do not change, only our belief in them... You are left with the only things that any of us have in the end. The things we keep inside of ourselves, that grow out of us, that tell us who we are.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

You can not stop you from being who you are.

I brought Hassan's son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

And one more thing...You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words.

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

I'm all you have in this world Mariam, and when I'm gone you'll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb -- assuming it was even in our womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn't enough. I wasn't nearly enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on. You must have realized it. But what could you do? You couldn't go down to the pawnshop and sell me.

You are lucky. How so? To know where you came from. I guess I never gave it much thought.: Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Take two Afghans who've never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they'll figure out how they're related.

The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what ageing is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them.

They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death.