No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.- Through the Gates of the Silver Key

I’ll never have to give an account for not being more like my favorite celebrity, that shining star in my chosen field or anybody else. And at the end of my life, the question I...

Soul, if you want to learn secrets, your heart must forget about shame and dignity. You are God’s lover, yet you worry what people are saying.

Appearances can be deceiving, but the true colours of your soul remain.

Don’t say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals ‘fine choice.

My culture is my identity and personality. It gives me spiritual, intellectual and Emotional distinction from others, and I am proud of it.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

At a certain point in his life he stopped searching for himself in everything that exists and gave in to temptations. Or, as you say, he sinned and later fled.

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.

You only know me as an ordinary human being, with flesh, blood and bones, but there is something about me too hard for you to decipher, for if i let you, you will ever regret...

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

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been...

…you became lost in the maze of me – forgive me Love, for keeping you close…

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

…being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.

Our selves are are rough and unrehearsed tales we tell the world.

Negro” societies are in full possession of the world’s knowledge and in control of their destinies, they will bring to an end all those savageries which for centuries have been committed in the name of...

No one knows me. Not anymore

The fact that both ego and self say “I” is a source of confusion and misidentification. The well-informed ego says truly, “I am what I know myself to be.” The self says merely, “I am.

No team has an identity yet. The first few weeks will be a feeling-out period.

Social class positioning influences all aspects of everyday interaction – how to talk, if to talk and when, whom to trust, whether or not to plan or risk, what can or cannot be done, how...

No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then … what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of...

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective...

poor me” victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others.

I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply anencounter, a trifle, you...

You know I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat. You know I adopted straight from the ASPCA, you feel me? Just breaking the boundaries, man, showing everybody it’s okay to be yourself. Embrace...

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise...

Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson’s memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous...

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

Who are you, Miss Snowe?”…”Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise.

We’re getting there offensively. We’re starting to get that identity.

Don’t bother calling the cops, because nobody can find me here. I know, because after all these years, I’m still trying to find myself.

If you tell me I look like someone you know, I might get panicked and think you’re on to me. I thought nobody saw me abduct that guy and steal his identity.

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate – to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love,...

I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.

It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless–a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there,...

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least...

I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it’s quite the opposite– he doesn’t try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn’t check if it’s going to work for his...

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our...

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the...

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

I am neither I nor the other oneI am something in between

I looked up “skin” in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body’s largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway...

Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it’s not just to escape the tyranny...

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it....

Americans tend to use “nation” as a synonym for “country.” But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people...

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

I don’t subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we’re all the same and race doesn’t exist. It’s a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we...

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...