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Exlpore more Identity quotes

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If you're born a man, be a man. If a woman, be proud of being one. For, you're not the body, mind, this or that. "Ye are gods!" - human."
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey


"True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale."


"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination."


"I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off."


"It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years."


"I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness."


"I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense."


"I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing."


"God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction."
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