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Identity Quotes
"Quit calling me Grey. It makes me sound like I'm a boy. Like Dorian Gray.'Dorian who?I sighed. 'Just think up something else. Plain old Nora works too, you know.'Sure thing, Gumdrop.I grimaced. 'I take that back. Let's stick with Grey."
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"A bear does not change its nature because it shed its fur."
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"We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place."
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"Remember, there's few things as powerful as being true to yourself."
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"He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending,wearing masks and losing themselves in the process."
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"There's a writer for you, he said. "Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing. [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers-because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer-still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying-only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers."
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"And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all."
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"Liking colors doesn't make you shallow.It gives you depth!"
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"She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies."
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"Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs are bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs." And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king."
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"Maybe you're not difficult to live with at all, maybe you're just a busy, successful, beautiful woman who won't settle for anything but the best."
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"I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something."
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"Real men don't dance to other people's tune, instead, they play for others to dance."
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"Sometimes if you want to stand out,you at first have to blend in."
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"There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."
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"I had passed, I had become the thing that had happened to me."
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"There is something you can do that nobody else can do."
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"Don't become a random photograph in the eyes of friends, and even your enemies, for each glance at your face will cause a declination of value and reputation. Create value, through scarcity."
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"The scarlet thread,the red clay from which we were made, runs in tiny streams through all our veins, reminding us of where we began..."
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"There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam's taming presence. It was also Ronan's favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia. But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn't show up in other versions. Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla's orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they'd returned to? Ronan didn't really care. All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning."
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"She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work."
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"There is a great identity crisis among students today. Who am I? What is the purpose of life? Where did I come from? Where am I going? The Bible has a direct answer to this great big philosophical question and unless God seals the vacuum among youth today, then some other ideology will, because young people must have a faith. They must believe in something to find fulfillment in their lives."
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"We could call you an ambisexual. A duosexual. A-"Do I really have to find a word for it? Kyle interrupts. "Can't it just be what it is?"Of course, I say, even though in the bigger world I'm not so sure. The world loves stupid labels. I wish we got to choose our own.We pause for a moment. I wonder if that's all-if he just needed to say the truth and have it heard. But then Kyle looks at me with unsure eyes and says, "You see, I don't know who I'm supposed to be."Nobody does, I assure him."
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"Our imperfections make us unique as surely as our strengths."
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"I didn't want to be ordinary," I mumbled.My mother looked up. "What ordinary, Charley?""You know. Someone you forget."From the other room came the squeals of children. Miss Thelma turned her chin to the sound. She smiled,"That's what keeps me from being forgotten."
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"I open my eyes and for the first time stare openly at my own reflection. My heart rate picks up as I do, like I am breaking the rules and will be scolded for it. It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else. Looking at myself now isn't like seeing myself for the first time; it's like seeing someone else for the first time. Beatrice was a girl I saw in stolen moments at the mirror, who kept quiet at the dinner table. This is someone whose eyes claim mine and don't release me; this is Tris."
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"We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating."
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"We are the estranged orphans of our nations and tribes, and we now bear the weight not of survival of the group but of personal identity."
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"This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet."
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"Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back."
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"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."
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"There is such a thirst to be known, isn't there? What is it about being known that would cause us to hunger so much after it, at any cost? I'm afraid too many of us have forgotten that far more noble is the journey that one embarks on to know oneself; than the trip one goes on in the search for fame. Isn't it better to know and to know and to know yourself and if your heart is found to be noble, isn't it better that you know this on your own and truly; rather than for you to chase after the thoughts that others might have of you? To be a true royal in heart is better than to be a false royal with a throne."
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"When I look in the mirror, I know I'm looking at someone who isn't sure she deserves to be loved at all."
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"It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world."
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"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."
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