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Identity Quotes
"I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither."
16
"Do not get caught pursuing the goals of who you used to be instead of who you are."
16
"We are who we are, but we know who we are through our response to the changing world."
16
"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."
16
"I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials."
16
"Uniqueness is like a signature, nobody can forge it's exact copy."
16
"Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation."
16
"You are what you are, and what you are is not me!"
16
"We are African in origin and American in birth."
16
"Like any girl, she still felt the echoes from earlier eras of repression. She'd been raised by a mother who'd fought hard to get a wage she deserved, to have access to education when she lacked every advantage, to travel on her own terms. The idea she was being asked-that she was expected to simply play along-made the blood throb in her veins. She was already in the damn stays. Wasn't the enough?"
16
"So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter's field I shall soon have both. What wealth!"
16
"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above."
16
"I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants."
16
"He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection."
16
"He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced-until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play."
16
"When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu."
16
"I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."
15
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."
15
"She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting."
15
"You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?"
15
"You look green, immature. A young boy playing at business, dressing up in the manner in which he believes an actual grown-up would. Your viewpoint of business attire is one of wide-eyed wonder from the nursery door."
15
"You may not be the smartest, richest or best looking person but you're probably not the dumbest, ugliest or poorest either."
15
"Men have the blood of their fathers and the passions of their mothers, in the same sense that women have the blood of their mothers and the passions of their fathers. We often find ourselves trapped in life when we fail to balance the two. The most unusual of men are those who are haunted by the warped blood of their fathers and the untamed passions of their mothers. They become either the legends of the legends that mankind remembers for generations or they end up as the fools of their time."
15
"I was born handsome and I will die handsome."
15
"He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once."
15
"I never blindly roamed with a team just for the sake of social labeling or fitting in. I was never part of a particular group, scene or tribe. I was friends with everybody. My best friend in high school was prom queen, yet I was voted the biggest nonconformist of my senior class."
15
"You are not white,but a rainbow of colors.You are not black,but golden.You are not just a nationality,but a citizen of the world.You are not just for the right or left,but for what is right over the wrong.You are not just rich or poor,but always wealthy in the mind and heart.You are not perfect, but flawed.You are flawed, but you are just.You may just be conscious human,but you are also a magnificentreflection of God."
15
"Image is only temporal. Substance endures. Who said, "Image is everything"? And who believed it?"
15
"I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...."
15
"Somehow in the chaos and mess she'd discovered who she was. Not a girl of the streets, though that was where she'd been raised. Not a woman of the court, though she appreciated the beauty and the grace of the balls. Someone else. Someone she liked."
15
"She was a restless soul. Born with black wings and a gypsy heart."
15
"To be acceptable is for one to ignore his weakness while knowing his strength, to cover the scar even though it's always there, however, to be impossible is for one to see his weakness as, not an adversary, but the cherry on top of his strength, to rearrange the scar so that it compliments his features."
15
"Tell us which ideas you promote and we will know which type of person you are."
15
"But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others."
15
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