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Identity Quotes
"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."
2
"You can't be me and I can't be you, so I guess that means we'll have to be ourselves."
2
"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."
2
"Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: 'I', 'me' and the 'others'. Since the "I entails what I want; the "me what others expect of me and the "others what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", "surroundings and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. ['I am on my own side, but I can listen ']"
2
"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."
2
"I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races."
2
"A person is not born as a finished product; we create ourselves every day. Resembling reality, no person is a fixed and unchangeable entity. Each of us is in the process of becoming. A person's perspective on their life experiences depends upon reviewing and integrating an emotional gamut of reconciling values with applied effort."
2
"She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, Billy said he didn't know."
2
"My femininity is always something I've tried to preserve in this dog-eat-dog world."
2
"Never allow anyone or anything to demise or dull your truest identity. Hurtful words and harsh judgments have no impact when your north star, your guiding light, shines from the center of your chest and beats from your own truest heart."
2
"We use the mind to create ourselves. Stuck amid the inevitable gaps between the mint of imagination and the postholes of actuality, we stutter step through the stratum of objective and subjective reality. We constantly amend our internal mental maps. Each day we awaken from the nighttime dream world with a revised identity of ourselves."
2
"Examining the background of anyone can bring skeletons to our attention; a blot on the landscape can mar all what pleases the eye. This is how Malcolm Price was perceived by those who would stand back in fear of what he was all about, yet nothing could be further from the truth!"
2
"I grabbed hold of my Divergence like it was a hand outstretched to save me. I needed that word to tell me who I was when everything else was coming apart around me. But now I'm wondering if I need it anymore, if we ever really need these words, 'Dauntless,' 'Erudite,' 'Divergent,' "Allegiant,' or if we can just be friends or lovers or siblings, defined instead by the choices we make and the love and loyalty that binds us."
2
"But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza."
2
"Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body."
2
"I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves."
2
"The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent."
2
"I am not perfect, but if I looked perfect to everyone I must have been rocking imperfect perfectly to a few imperfect souls that seek imperfection vs. perfection, in an imperfect world where God asks us to seek perfection for our imperfect souls."
2
"You are what you are, and what you are is not me!"
2
"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."
2
"A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave."
2
"Forms come and go. You, the quantum non-entity behind your human identity, comes nor goes."
2
"I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam."
2
"Your self-reliance, self-appraisal and self- perception depends on how successful you are at knowing who God has created you to become."
2
"We seldom look up to the person, we usually look up to their persona."
2
"Everyone in the valleys knew me and because of that, so many people used my name in the valleys that there must have been at least a hundred times a night that the name 'Malcolm Price' was used."
2
"To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity."
2
"Weird makes you truly sexy in a way the world can never know."
2
"I've been through a lot, but I stayed true to who I am."
2
"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."
2
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