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Identity Quotes


"Some girls feel they are like boys, They play rough, they like a lot of noise."


"A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors for the expression of all his history and his wants."


"You'll never know who you are unless you shed who you pretend to be."


"It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self - confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started."


"I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don't love-until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach-but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it's such a blessing that I'm not left to my own devices."


"Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make."



"You could just tell when a person belonged somewhere. That is something you can't fake, no matter how hard you try."


"You were born an original work of art. Stay original."


"She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself."


"We employ our personality, what we know, think, and believe, in order to interpret the world, making self-understanding a critical act because it establishes the baseline for our philosophical and intellectual approach towards life."



"Pluto claimed that in ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half - man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their whole lives searching for their other halves."


"In my father's scheme of things, there were Italians and then there was the rest of the world."


"We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm."


"Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position."


"Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do - have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly."


"And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there."


"I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand."


"Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness."



"Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,.."


"Don't be afraid to be who you are, no matter who that person might be."


"RSL has more star-liners than any other company, and covers every commercial route in known space. Demeter is one of the biggest, carrying up to 4500 passengers and crew at any single point on its never-ending, circular cruise around the Terran Empire. And me? Where do I fit in? My name is Sean Lange, and you will probably have never heard of me. It's sad somehow, I always wanted to leave some kind of a legacy in this life, and perhaps to be remembered. Instead, circumstances have arranged it so that this is probably the last time I will ever use that name."


"I climb the door instead of a treeJust to crawl with myself walking freeWhat if I'm a lizard beneath my skinChanging my colours of the human I've been."


"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."


"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress , my hairdresser, my make-up, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments."


"I kept waiting for the part where I'd finally know who I was - some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came."


"Mostly you are what they think you are."



"People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair."


"They set about making people so unhappy and isolated and when they crawl into a hole and pull it in after them, they have the nerve to call homosexuality a 'suicidal lifestyle'. And yet they do this - and deny that any gay or trans person could ever be a 'true' Christian. As if THEY are."


"Max is a marvel to us. He will never have to come out because he will never have been kept in. Even though he has a mom and a dad, they made sure from the beginning to tell him that it didn't have to be a mom and a dad. It could be a mom and a mom, a dad and a dad, just a mom, or just a dad. When Max's early affections became clear, he didn't think twice about them. He doesn't see it as defining him. It is just a part of his definition."


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


"A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street."


"Decide the type of person you want to be, and when others aren't looking, unique up on them."


"And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than the man."


"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever."


"If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it."


"You can't know people, only their names."
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