identity Quotes

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“What we know matters but who we are matters more.”

“I’m slowly learning how to straddle the tension that comes with understanding that I am tough and tender, brave and afraid, strong and struggling - all of these things, all of the time. I’m working on letting go of having to be one or the other and embracing the wholeness of wholeheartedness. The roles in my life - partner, mother, teacher, researcher, leader, entrepreneur - all require me to bring my whole self to the table. We can’t be ‘all in’ if only parts of us show up. If we’re not living, loving, parenting, or leading with our whole, integrated hearts, where doing it halfheartedly.”

“Our identities are always changing and growing, they’re not meant to be pinned down. Our histories are never all good or all bad, and running from the past is the surest way to be defined by it. That’s when it owns us. The key is bringing light to the darkness - developing awareness and understanding.”

“A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, ‘My story matters because I matter.’ A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn’t. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we’ve convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster.”

“I’m not a bit changed--not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me--back here--is just the same.”

“We all have souls of different ages.”

“But if you call me Anne, please call me Anne spelled with an E.”

“I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.”

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

“There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”

“I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.”

“I came from the end of bag, but no bag went over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ring-winner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.”

“Then Bilbo fled [with the cup]. But the dragon did not wake – not yet – but shifted into other dreams of greed and violence, lying there in his stolen hall while the little hobbit toiled back up the long tunnel. His heart was beating and a more fevered shaking was in his legs than when he was going down, but still he clutched the cup, and his chief thought was: ‘I’ve done it! This will show them. ‘More like a grocer than a burglar’ indeed! Well, we’ll hear no more of that.‘”

“I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.”

“I also learned that I am a child of God--and that trumps everything else.”

“As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.”

“Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.”

Underneath my outside face, There’s a face that none can see. A little less smiley, A little less sure, But a whole lot more like me.

“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”

“There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.

“I step to the side so I stand in front of the mirror. I see muscles that I couldn’t see before in my arms, legs, and stomach. I pinch my side, where a layer of fat used to hint at curves to come. Nothing. Dauntless initiation has stolen whatever softness my body had. Is that good, or bad?”

“Maybe my problem isn’t that I can’t go home. I will miss my mother and father and Caleb and evening firelight and the clack of my mother’s knitting needles, but that is not the only reason for this hollow feeling in my stomach. My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.”

“No, I was wrong; I didn’t jump off the roof because I wanted to be like the Dauntless. I jumped off because I already was like them, and I wanted to show myself to them. I wanted to acknowledge a part of myself that Abnegation demanded that I hide.”

“When I look at the Abnegation lifestyle as an outsider, I think it’s beautiful. When I watch my family move in harmony; when we go to dinner parties and everyone cleans together afterward without having to be asked; when I see Caleb help strangers carry their groceries, I fall in love with this life all over again. It’s only when I try to live it myself that I have trouble. It never feels genuine. But choosing a different faction means I forsake my family. Permanently.”

“Tori was the only one in the tattoo place, so I felt safe getting the symbol of Abnegation—a pair of hands, palms up as if to help someone stand, bounded by a circle—on my right shoulder. I know it was a risk, especially after all that’s happened. But that symbol is a part of my identity, and it felt important to me that I wear it on my skin.”

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

“The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her, —so much power to do, and power to sympathize, —that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.”

“Let him do his spite. My services which I have done the signiory Shall out-tongue his complaints. ‘Tis yet to know (Which, when I know that boasting is an honor, I shall promulgate) I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached.”

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

They made you into a statistic. But, that’s not the real you. That’s not who you are inside.

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!”

“Willy, when’re you gonna realize that them things don’t mean anything. You named him Howard, but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.”

″There’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it . . . We are untitled, untamed, natural, suspended between was and will be . . . We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then . . . we become ourselves.″

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past “weird” and “strange” and “goofy.” Her ways knocked us off balance.”

“As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”

“My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.”

“I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl . . .I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.”

″She is one of us. Most decidedly. She is us more than we are us. She is, I think, who we really are. Or were.″

“The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state...Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.”

“His face was close to mine. He must have seen my terror. “You needn’t be Ella if you don’t want to be,” he said softly.”

“Her eyes lingered a moment on Selia, and she found herself thinking, She would be better at playing princess than I am. The thought stung. Ani wanted so badly to do it right, to be regal and clever and powerful. But too often her only truly happy moments were the bursts of freedom, stolen afternoons on her horse’s back, brief, breathtaking rides past the stables to where the gardens turned wild, her lungs stinging with the cold, her muscles trembling with the hard ride.”

″‘You’re Enna,’ said Ani. ‘That’s somebody.’ Enna smiled. ‘So’s Isi.’ Is she? thought Ani. Then I’d like to be her. I’d like to be somebody. ‘She is, you are,’ said Enna, as though she had heard Ani’s doubt.”

“Ani lay down and, putting one arm over her face as though it were a wing, tried to shut out the world where she did not belong.”

“There is something of the dormouse in him still. Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it.”

“Jok made the sounds indicating he was ready to sleep, so she took off her hat and unwound her hair, scratched her head, and sighed. The weight of her hair on her back reminded her that she was not who she was. That she was a secret.”

“My name is Percy Jackson. I’m twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. Am I a troubled kid? Yeah. You could say that.”

“Just think of it, Crown Princess, you can start a new life with new possibilities. You will decide who you are.”

“And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose—revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become.”

“The winter breeze still brushed against her cheek, and again she heard her name— Princess—and what had laid on her tongue since the morning of her birth now loosened.”

“Thomas rocked back on his heels, then ran his arm across his forehead, wiping away the sweat. And at that moment, in the space of only a few seconds, he learned a lot about himself. About the Thomas that was before. He couldn’t leave a friend to die”

“If you base your identity on having friends, being accepted, and being popular, you may find yourself compromising your standards or changing them every weekend to accommodate your friends.”

“Who wanted to reassure her? Mr. Nobley or the actual man, Actor X?”

“I’ve only been half myself lately, and I thought coming here would let me work this part out of me so I could be me again.”

“Without dignity, identity is erased.”

“You know I’d never expect you to change who you are, if you were my wife,” he finally said. “It would change me to be your wife,” she said. He watched her eyes.“Yes. I understand you.”

″‘Why did you do it anyway?‘he says. ‘I don’t know. To show them that I’m more than just a piece in their Games?’ I say.”

″‘She’s not dead. She’s a drama queen. Wants attention.‘”

“To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

“Call me however what thou wilt—I am who I must be. I call myself Zarathustra.”

“My voice is changing already. It always happens around ‘other’ people, whether I’m at Williamson or not. I don’t talk like me or sound like me. I choose every word carefully and make sure I pronounce them well. I can never, ever let anyone think I’m ghetto.”

“‘This is where you can find your soul, if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you’ve never dared look at before.’”

“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”

″‘No,’ said Coraline quietly, ‘I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.‘”

“This closet is abandoned - it has no purpose, no name. It is the perfect place for me.”

“A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only...”

“I can’t change where I come from or what I’ve been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”

“I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family’s strait-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”

“‘But the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I’ll be in love with tomorrow. I love that you’re fragile and tough, quiet and kick-ass. Hell, you’re one of the punkest girls I know, no matter who you listen to or what you wear.’”

“Worthless. Stupid. These are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun, because if I let them in, they might stay there and grow and fill me up and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless stupid worthless stupid worthless stupid freak. And then there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words: This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.”

″‘You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, I guess I have been.’ ‘You didn’t even know anything about yourself.’ ‘I don’t guess I did, in a way.‘”

“We are old now, yet we were young this morning, when we carried our glass box through the streets of the City to the Home of the Scholars.”

“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”

Then it is done. From this day forward, the truth of you, now and forever more, will be Sidious.

“We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt no pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.”

“The walls are lined with school photos. Finch in kindergarten. Finch in middle school. He looks different every year, not just agewise but personwise. Class-clown Finch. Awkward Finch. Cocky Finch. Jock Finch.”

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mes is me? There is only one me I’ve ever really liked, and he was good and awake as long as he could be.”

“We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever.”

“‘He’s a gentleman.’ There aren’t many people who would say this about me, but the great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”

″‘But I guess you’re different, aren’t you, Bud? I guess you sort of carry your family around inside of you, huh?’ ‘I guess I do. Inside my suitcase, too.‘”

“I was always aware that I was Frank Abagnale, Jr., that I was a check swindler and a faker, and if and when I was caught I wasn’t going to win any Oscars. I was going to jail.”

“Trouble was, at the time I didn’t know what I was or who I was.”

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.”

″‘The only chance I had of coming at Prince Justin was to use that curse she’d put on me to get near her.’ ‘So you were going to rescue the Prince!’ Sophie shouted. ‘Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?’ ‘Not likely!’ Howl yelled. ‘I’m a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I’m not doing it!’ Oh dear! Sophie thought, looking round at the swirling grit. He’s being honest! And this is a wind. The last bit of the curse has come true!”

“She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.’ ”

“Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.”

“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”

″...as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and I regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”

“Then, the question I asked myself was: Do I look pretty? Now, the question I ask is: Do I look strong?”

″ ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t call yourself The Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.’ ”

“You have words of your own, Cassia,” Grandfather says to me. “I have heard some of them and they are beautiful.”

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together...”

“Then I went on, and my feet seemed to be a long way off, and everything seemed to come from a long way off, and I could hear my feet walking a great distance away.”

“Margot would say she belongs to herself. Kitty would say she belongs to no one. And I guess I would say I belong to my sisters and my dad, but that won’t always be true. To belong to someone - I didn’t know it, but now that I think about it, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To really be somebody’s , and to have them be mine.”

“I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed . . . Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.”

“Do you think there’s a difference? Between belonging with and belong to, I mean?”

“Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

“He said we were making this move to learn about bravery and courage. That sounded awfully familiar.”

“The one thing we could not do was settle on a name. Nothing seemed quite right. Nothing was perfect enough for this baby. My father seemed more worried about this than my mother. “Something will come to us,” my mother said. “The perfect name will arrive in the air one day.”″

“I wish someone would call me by my real name. My name isn’t Sugar. It’s Chanhassen.”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”

“Everybody is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we’re all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. ‘Look at my worry. Worry with me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.‘” Gram sighed.”

“I had never seen him angry. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re human,” my mother told him. It was the sort of thing she said just before she left, and it bothered me, because it seemed as if she wanted him to be meaner, less good.”

“I can’t tell you exactly who I am,” replied the querulous whine, “because I’ve only been born a few hours – but my last name is certainly Button.”

“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there.”

“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”

“That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.”

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

“As a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ‘em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.”

“The problem of human existence is the forgetfulness of the Divine essence of the Self and the identification with the body as the Self.”

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”

“I want to sue (my parents) for the rights to my own body.”

“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.”

“Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.”

″‘I don’t really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

“As we got older, I didn’t seem to exist, except in relation to her.”

“Nevertheless, we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store.”

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”

“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.”

“Asagai: …You came up to me and you said… “Mr. Asagai—I want very much to talk with you. About Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity! (He laughs).”

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

“I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot [...] I felt like a hole in the ground.”

“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo.”

“I have a feeling that if I really try to figure out who I am without Kate in the equation, I’m not going to like who I see.”

“That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

“Huh, Dilsey said. Name aint going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks don’t have no luck, changing names. My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they’s long forgot me.”

“Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn’t. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn’t help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.”

“Freak says we can’t expect her to understand, because you can’t really get what it means to be Freak the Mighty unless you are Freak the Mighty.”

“I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”

“And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself. Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself.”

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

“I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.”

“It was true, I thought, it is the Márez blood in us that touches us with this urge to wander. Like the restless, seeking sea.”

“In that one there is hope,” I heard my uncle Juan say to mother. I knew he talked about me. ”

“I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other . . . It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all.”

“One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing. In fact, fitting in is one of the greatest barriers to belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

“Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element.”

“Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.”

“It’s about becoming what I want to become. Not what some surgical committee thinks I should.”

“We have come to realize in modern times that the ‘melting pot’ need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions.”

“I don’t want to be ugly all my life. I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think, ‘Who’s that?’ and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say.”

“It’s like my identity’s an orbit that I’ve strayed far away from.”

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.”

“I abandoned my disguise and became myself, free from fear or weakness or lust.”

“‘You bear many names, and so I shall name you as well.’ Her hand rose to Celaena’s forehead and she drew an invisible mark. ‘I name you Elentiya.’ She kissed the assassin’s brow. “I give you this name to use with honor, to use when other names grow too heavy. I name you Elentiya, ‘Spirit That Could Not Be Broken.””

“I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place.”

“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.”

“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

“Although divorce was harder than a death, still I felt oddly returned to myself after many years in a close family.”

“Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.”

“Where you are is who you are. The inside further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.”

“My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn’t be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.”

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”

“I’m sure I looked no more elegant than a guest at an inn looks wearing a robe on the way to the bath. But I’d never before worn anything nearly so glamorous on my body.”

“I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.”

“Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.”

“I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds.”

“Once upon a time a man who had become invisible arrived in America.”

“I’d spent nearly sixty years trying to hide how competitive I was, and it didn’t work anyway, so why didn’t I just own it? I am competitive. I want to be the best. I want to pursue excellence every day of my life.”

“Fear is a stranger to the ways of love. Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself.”

“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

“What if I’m a princess on another planet? And no one on this planet knows it?”

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”

“We are what we choose to be.”

“She did not look into my eyes, did not see the lion inside. She did not see the me of me, the Isabel.”

“– Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how it has changed you.”

″‘Then again, you could always just stick with half English and half Israeli, since—’ ‘I’M AMERICAN!’ I shouted. My mother blinked. From the corner of the room where he was looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered, ‘No, you’re not. You’re Jewish.‘”

“My book was nowhere to be found. Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.”

“You can’t just wake up one day and decide to be an elephant, Alfred. The world doesn’t work like that. There are rules, Alfred. And you want to stomp all over them. Get over yourself.”

“I can’t believe it. My president is black like me. ”

“This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that’s not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I’ve ever been. I’m actually fine with myself right now.”

“She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers.”

“Junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

“You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”

“When I am dead – I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished from – I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right when I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with ‘hate.‘”

“I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839.”

“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

“The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me.”

“That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.”

“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”

“She is not béké like you, but she is béké, and not like us either.”

“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.”

“There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now... The girl I saw was myself not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us – hard, cold, and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?”

“The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all--oh, above all else--ambitious.”

“I remember saying in a voice that was not like my own that it was too light.”

“Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right?”

“I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll’s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice.”

“We went out to this place that Marty said served the best electrolyte chunkies, but it had closed a year before. It was dinnertime, so we had dinner at a J.P. Barnum’s Family Extravaganza, which was pretty good, and just like the one at home. We got some potato skins for appetizers.”

“Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.”

“We had a party at the end of the week over at Quendy’s, because her parents were off choking somewhere. That was when everyone was having those choking parties. I mean, it was completely midlife crisis.”

“The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.”

“Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of Oh? Wow! Thing! Had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool.”

“I didn’t know how close she was to the person who had gone completely fugue at the party.”

“You love your child for who the child is, not as an extension of your identity or as an example of your good parenting or even as a companion.”

“God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

“Connor is a celebrity in his dormitory. He finds it absurd and surreal that the kids here see him as some sort of symbol, when all he did was survive.”

“This is what I was born for. It’s what I’ve lived my life for. I am chosen. I am blessed. And I am happy.”

“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), ‘Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?’ chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

“He was never ‘Connor’ to them. He was always ‘that Lassiter boy.‘”

″‘Ain’t no one gonna tell you what’s in your heart,’ he tells Lev. ‘You gotta find that out for yourself.‘”

″‘Don’t you see, Lev? You can save yourself. You can be anyone you want to be now.‘”

“The mother is nineteen, but she doesn’t feel that old.”

“Thinking ahead has never been one of Connor’s strong points. If it was, he might not have gotten into the various situations that have plagued him over the past few years. Situations that got him labels like ‘troubled’ and ‘at risk,’ and finally this last label, ‘unwind.‘”

“The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity.”

“Because we see things, always, through the filter of who we are.”

“She was caught between two allegiances...Herself. Her race.”

“She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvelous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”

″...there’s no way of stopping it until you find the person responsible and sack them. If you don’t identify the culprit fairly soon, you’re going to have another year without showing a profit....”

“Much of a child’s identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can’t stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships.”

“How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.”

“The mind feasts on what it focuses on. What consumes my thinking will be the making or the breaking of my identity.”

“You prefer to identify with the part of you who watches television or cooks or works — the part you think knows what it is doing.”

“Love her but leave her wild ”

“It’s a very important name – I don’t expect there are many bears in the world called Paddington!”

″‘Jacob have I loved …’ Suddenly my stomach flipped. Who was speaking? I couldn’t remember the passage. Was it Isaac, the father of the twins? No, even the Bible said that Isaac had favored Esau. Rebecca, the mother, perhaps? It was her conniving that helped Jacob steal the blessing from his brother. Rebecca—I had hated her from childhood, but somehow I knew that these were not her words...”

“Some are not who they say they are, and some are not who they seem to be.”

″‘For instance, I know that Angela doesn’t want to marry that sappy intern.’ ‘Ridiculous. You’re just jealous of your sister.’ ‘Maybe,’ Turtle had to admit, ‘but I am what I am. I don’t need a crutch to get attention.’ Oh, oh, she had gone too far.”

“Never had I uttered such a speech before. Never had I thought myself capable of it. Never have I made such a speech again. Because, perhaps, never did such anger seize me as possessed me that day. Upstairs in the ruins of my home foreign soldiers were fighting for my country. Here in the cellar I was fighting for myself.”

“Remembering home he suddenly became inward and didn’t want to say any more about all that. He dabbed flakes of croissant on to a finger-end and licked them away.”

“He shifted in his seat and smiled secretly. The pleasure of self-discovery.”

“Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that’s who you are.”

“Then a man asked, ‘What is your name, boy?’ Henry did not know what to say. He did not want to tell his name. So he answered, ‘Henry James.’ Now this was Henry’s name, but it was not all of his name.”

″‘Can’t I see them?’ begged Mr. Alden. ‘I won’t tell them who I am.‘”

“I don’t like living in caves. Do neanderthal people wear stone trousers?”

“They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”

“Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.”

“I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick.”

“I’d lost myself while trying to convince someone else that I was what he wanted. I’d forgotten who I was because I’d let someone else take over the definition.”

“He felt as though he was a different person lying there in the dark. He was no longer Willie. It was as if he had said goodbye to an old part of himself. Neither was he two separate people. He was Will inside and out.”

“In the stillness and quiet, not only do we connect with God but we are also able to more clearly identify what is wrong. Recognizing our spirals and naming them is the first step in interrupting them.”

“Let them take everything. They cannot take who we are.”

“He is aware that his parents, and their friends, and the children of their friends, and all his own friends from high school, will never call him anything but Gogol.”

“I don’t know who I am right now. But I know who I’m not. And I like that.”

“Discarding your equipment means admitting failure and shedding part of your identity. You have to rethink your goal in your job- and your role in life.”

“He didn’t want to be a mirror of his father. The thought made him cringe. I want to do something. Be somebody. But what? But what?”

“It’s kind of a good thing, too, when you know your own personality so you don’t need the one the gang makes for you.”

″‘I’m Jewish too.’ ‘You’re not!’ ‘I am!’ My father was talking to us about it only last week. He said we were Jews and no matter what happened my brother and I must never forget it.‘”

“I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devas­tated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible.”

“Your mind is your strongest muscle. It holds the key to your belief about the way you feel and the way you see yourself.”

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to…a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”

“I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.”