"I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self."

Identity, Quest, Self

59

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self."

Exlpore more Identity quotes

"She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Emotion, Wisdom, Power

"Who would you impress if the world was blind?"

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Identity, Truth, Life, Wisdom

"Call me Richard. That's my real name. Call me that."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Today, Power

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Connection, Desire, Defiance

"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Love, Complexity, Sexuality

"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Appearance, Age, Perception, Time

"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Freedom, Snobbery, Detachment

"The fact is no one has understood me in entirety till now!"

Ramana Pemmaraju, Indian Physician

Identity, Understanding, Isolation, Self

"But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Absence, Memory, Mind

"We go to Europe to be Americanized."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Identity, Europe, Travel, Culture

Explore more quotes by Mary McCarthy

"Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man."

Behavior

"The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner."

Art

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

Bureaucracy

"The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process."

Life

"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons."

Politics

"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."

Trust

"Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Lie

"Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof."

Negative

"The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero."

Writing

"Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard."

Life