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Identity Quotes


"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."


"As individuals express their life, so they are."


"I didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then."


"If you want the truth about being different,all you have to do is look in the mirror."


"If you were a country," I said, "what would your national anthem be?"I meant a pre-existing song -- "What a Wonderful World" or "Que Sera, Sera" or something to make it a joke, like "Hey Ya!" ("I would like, more than anything else, for my nation to be shaken like a Polaroid picture.")"


"Little people make tall claims. As being this-that avatar or messiah. Some even say they're God. Well, if they are, I'm their grand-pop."


"If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with-and vice versa-the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed."


"I can't help what I have any more than you can help what you don't."


"I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."


"We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves."


"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."



"You'll never be able to find yourself if you're lost in someone else."


"You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'We can't both be Alexander.'Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between."


"People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people -- as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped."


"Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable."



"If we really want to know, who we are and recognize our identity, we have to find out the identity of the others. By making friends with the others, we are able to make friends with ourselves. At that moment, we can sense how everything falls into place. [' Steps in the unknown']"


"We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on."


"Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be."


"No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. "No, not rich, he said. "I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."


"Were I but perfectly normal, I would just not be."


"You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse."


"Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."


"Many of us will not realize who we are because we do not want to go through the pain and trials."


"I am what I am and I can't change it. I know how to cope and how to get by. I don't want or expect anyone to stand with me. I don't need anyone to. I've learned to accept my life just the way it is, and I don't give a damn if you or anyone else doesn't."


"When you forget about your self consciousness for a moment, you forget about your true self, your real you and your true purpose for a moment."



"A passport, as I'm sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries, so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly."


"Whether it is in the way you walk, talk, dress, or behave, your personal brand impacts how people react and respond to you. It is the essence of what makes you likable, knowable, and trustworthy. And it is what can make you memorable and sought after in the marketplace."


"But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass."


"Remember, there's few things as powerful as being true to yourself."


"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."


"She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her." His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something.""Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said."
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