Identity Quotes - Page 4

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.

Thomm Quackenbush

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)

John Burnside

There comes a time when all that remains for us to do is to surrender to the idiosyncrasies of our nature.

Floriano Martins

We must not be anything other than what we are.

Maaza Mengiste

I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

Charlotte Eriksson

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.

Charles Taylor

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Joan Didion

I protect myself by refusing to know myself.

Floriano Martins

The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy.

Floriano Martins

Who are you? What are you? Why are you?

Debasish Mridha

My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God’s acceptance of me given as a gift in Christ.

J.D. Greear

To know Jesus Christ, you must first understand his supernatural identity. He is God.

Felix Wantang

Because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value, are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us.

Tullian Tchividjian

I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.

Peter S Beagle

Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it's even more true today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?

Sherman Alexie

People with dissociative disorders are like actors trapped in a variety of roles. They have difficulty integrating their memories, their sense of identity and aspects of their consciousness into a continuous whole. They find many parts of their experience alien, as if belonging to someone else. They cannot remember or make sense of parts of their past.

David Speigel

the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception

American Psychiatric Association

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. 'The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.

Erwin Schrödinger

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here its like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself if I could just come in I swear I'll leave. Won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.

Miranda Lambert

But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features.

Marcel Proust

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Gilles Deleuze

No one can soothe my inner being like you. No one can make me look to the future with such excitement like you did. No one can understand me, fulfill me, fit me like you did." ~Emma Ranstein

Lindsay Detwiler

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

Edmund Wilson

Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams

James Grissom

We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ("Walking down the memory lane" )

Erik Pevernagie

We have to watch Nana's life slipping away from her like a forgotten word. I thought I understood what's happening to her, but this isn't like being robbed a penny at a time. Memories aren't currency to spend; they're us. Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.

Shaun David Hutchinson

Each time, we ask, "Who am I?", we answer the question differently. Our identity evolves, as it is the sum of our thoughts, words and deeds. To be ourselves, we have to remember ourselves, which makes our very identity conditional. Each time we remember, we reaffirm our individuality. Our existence as an independent person depends on it, but we don't exist as self-enclosed units of matter. Who we are cannot be remembered or forgotten. Our identity, as we perceive it, only appears in consciousness. Underneath, it exists in a thoughtless, wordless awareness, in which there is no "We" or "I", just an "Amness"...simply an indescribable sense of being.

Anita B. Sulser PhD

Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.

Tony Burgess

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

Larry McCaffrey

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

John Lahr

Our finger print represents our unique identity and individuality.

Lailah Gifty Akita

If you lose your integrity, you will also lose your identity, your sensitivity and your dignity. Integrity is honesty, modesty and security in all kinds of weather. It should be our priority!

Israelmore Ayivor

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies." (pg. 71)

Deb Caletti

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

James Baldwin

The dictionary says my identity should be all about being separate or distinct, and yet it feels like it is so wrapped up in others.

Mary E. Pearson

You know you do not understand yourself if everyone seems to understand you.

Moffat Machingura

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be 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.

Brené Brown

Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?

Virginia Woolf

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

Dionne Brand

Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind’s ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind’s ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity.

Kilroy J. Oldster

You must confront your past. At some time or other you must confront your past. It doesn't flash before your eyes, I knew that, but it's always there. We are our past. There is nothing else, and none of it can be undone.

The Fall

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

John Updike

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

John Updike

Identity is not the face,Identity is not the trait,Neither is it the success pace,Nor is it the personality grace.Let alone it being your cliché phrase,Or did you think,It’s some religious faith?My child, it’s alarming that it’s none,It’s even not tongue,Then how can it be, what problems you have overcomeAnd the person you have become!

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. If you tell them -- you compassionate and accommodating human readers -- that they may bring their distress and anguish before any other authority, you will be cruelly deceiving and mocking them. For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: 'Who am I?

Karen Blixen

The path you walk is unique and needed. There is no other like yours. On your path you experience love, joy and peace, as well as loneliness, sadness and torment. These all are specific lessons you choose to rediscover your divine identity.

Raphael Zernoff

Thinking is a personalized activity that can lead us into a state of happiness or cause us to be sad. Who we are becomes a product of how we think. What we think about and how we integrate knowledge into a comprehensive schema regulates our evolving self-identity. The precision of the human mind and the interplay between cognitive thinking and reactive emotions plays a central role in self-identity.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one.And his poor old father was a mad one.The two begot this sad one.Alas for the single shoeThe Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond,Fishing for fairiesOn the prankish adviceOf two disagreeable lovers of small boys.Pity the unfortunate Sad BoyWith a single magic shoeAnd a pair of feetAnd an extra footWith no shoe for it.This was how the terrible hopping beganThat wore the Sad Boy thin and throughTo his only shoeAnd started the great fright in the provinces above BrentWhere the Sad Boy became half of himselfTo match the beautiful bootHe had dripped from the green pond.Wherever he went weeping and hoppingAnd stamping and sobbing,Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven,Things split where he stoodInto the left side for the left magic,Into no side for the missing right boot.Mercy be to the Sad BoyScamping exasperatedAfter a wide bootTo double the magicOf a limping foot.Mercy to the melancholy folkOn the Sad Boy's right.It was not for want of wanderingHe lost the left boot tooAnd the knowledge of his left side,But because one awful SundayThis dear boy dislimbedWent back to the old pondTo fish up another shoeAnd was quickly (being too light for his line)Fished in.Gracious how he kicks nowAll the little ripples up!The quiet population of Brent has settled down,And the perfect surface of the famous pondIs slightly pocked, marked with three signs,For visitors come to fish for souvenirs,Where the Sad Boy went inAnd his glad mother and his mad father after him.

Laura Riding Jackson

I said uselessly, "Sam, don't go."Sam cupped my face in his hands and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were yellow, sad, wolf, mine. "These stay the same. Remember that when you look at me. Remember it's me. Please.

Maggie Stiefvater

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

Charlotte Eriksson

I have no definable history before I was abandoned and taken in by the orphanage in Hong Kong. I truly am a blank sheet. I have been disconnected from my ancestors. I don't know who they are, where they came from or whether any of their line still exists. The ancestral umbilical cord that would have connected me to my past and linked me to my future, was permanently severed. It cannot be reattached

Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

Arthur Miller

You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.

Harold Pinter

The things that truly define me can’t be lost.

Amy Neftzger

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.

Emma Cline

Often we can't reach what is in front of us until we let go what is behind. Don't let your struggle become your identity.

Chris Vonada

My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.

Terry Tempest Williams

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

Lewis Carroll

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Identity Quotes - Page 4

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