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Identity Quotes
"As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be."
23
"Identities were created for clarity and simplicity but it divides!"
22
"I want to have the heart and mind of a queen, she whispered. "I want it more than anything. But I'm only pretending. I can't find the feeling of it inside."
22
"Guys, you don't have to act 'manly' to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop."
22
"It wasn't about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn't about what she said in class - usually something no one else would've thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn't have dared to say. It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't."
22
"I rank myself no higher in the scheme of things than a policeman - whose utility would disappear if there were no criminals."
22
"To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity."
22
"On the same line of reasoning, if Australians were to be Australians, or rather if Australians were as separate from any other nation as Australia from any other land, there would be no jealousy between them on England's account."
22
"Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist."
21
"My Irish passport makes me look like a chief of staff for the Provisional IRA."
21
"Do not blindly accept anyone's definition of your life and define it yourself."
21
"It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else."
21
"All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?"
21
"Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before."
21
"Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!"
21
"Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is."
21
"A lot of mothers incorrectly see the meaning of their lives as being the designer or creator of their child's life."
21
"Your digital footprints speak volumes than your CV."
21
"Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans."
21
"That's basically what I'm doing when I'm tapping them - getting my toes to the end of my shoes."
21
"I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be."
20
"There is a whole school of Canadian academics, media personalities, and politicians whose definition of a Canadian is a North American who fears or dislikes the United States."
20
"Other kids are kids almost just like you - it's true.Other kids are kids too, but there's no other you, but YOU!"
20
"Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory."
20
"Oh, Gods."His eyes shone with want and predatory satisfaction. "The name's William. It's a common mistake."
20
"You cut yourself off from all sorts of experience because you tell yourself you re not 'that sort of person."
20
"The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in."
20
"I mean . . . I don't know. I don't know what I want to do, or who I want to be, or where I want to live. I don't know. I like reading about adventure, sure, but I also like doing it from the safety of home. But what is home, besides a quilt-covered bed? Where is it?"
20
"Make yourself your role model, because people who do not have qualities depend on the qualities of others to shape their own qualities."
19
"It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly."
19
"Every individual, however original he may be, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family and friends. Only thus is he truly himself. If in all this relativity he tries to be the absolute, then he becomes ridiculous."
19
"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
19
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