Uncategorized Quotes - Page 15

Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Yesterday Allison bought me nail polish in the annoying shade of mauve. How can anyone look at me and think mauve?

I was a rule-follower. I obeyed all forms of authority. I had never before encountered a situation where the authority was clearly wrong and I had to stand up for what was right.

I know who I am, and I know who you are, and nothing else matters. it's how we live our life.

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.

Judith Lewis Herman

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

Alain de Botton

I got in a fight with my girlfriend," I said. "I was just driving around, blowing off steam, you know?"Well, you should be more careful where you drive," the officer said. "You're making people nervous. You don't fit the profile of the neighborhood."I wanted to tell him that I didn't fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

Questions from earlier circle like buzzards. Am I running away or moving forward?

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

Carson McCullers

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

Jorge Luis Borges

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

Practical! On Wednesday afternoons I could be practically anything. What's up?

Dani said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. “I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, “and that’s all I ever am to them.

She was right. After all, if she herself had wondered whether she was Indian enough -- she, who had always been to me a sort of epitome of Indian -- then who could be? Who could claim the sole right or way to an identity?

Tanuja Desai Hidier

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant.

For a long time, we assume we know who we are, until the moment we fully realize who that is; in that moment, identity is no longer predictable, but rather takes the form of a truth that, like any other, can become a sentence with no more than a change of perspective.

Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle?

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

Orson Scott Card

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

Margaret Atwood

Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.

Christopher John Farley

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

Michael Ondaatje

We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, “Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine.” So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there’s a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination.

...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

o•cean (ˈōSHən) n. pl. -s. 1. The endless part of yourself you never knew but always suspected was there. [2015, Whittier]

Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you

Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?

Kelli Jae Baeli

Behind every mask there is a face, and behind that a story.

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.

It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.

Gary D. Schmidt

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.

Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity.

Mary E. Pearson

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.

In order to live a meaningful life,humans need answers, i.e., a certain understanding of basic existential questions. These ‘answers’ do not have to be made completely explicit, as a lack of words does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding, but one has to able to place oneself in the world and build a relatively stable identity. The founding of such an identity is only possible if one can tell a relatively coherent story about who one has been and who one intends to be.

Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

The end comes to all of us...but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?

Christopher John Farley

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

Where you are is who you are. The 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.

One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

I look like vanilla pudding so nobody knows that on the inside I am spider soup.

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.

It’s scary telling someone you care about, someone you love who you really are.

Eric Jerome Dickey

Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

Clarice Lispector

We are what we are...

Ke$ha

Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.

He wished he could be anywhere else and anyone else but Here and Him.

James R. Silvestri

Looking for who I am is who I am.

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.

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