I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I’ve learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you’re betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell...

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

And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know...

You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty...

Sometimes the most important conversation we can have is with the waves of the ocean or the dewdrops on a blade of grass. Sometimes the easiest way to love yourself is to realize that you...

We were searching for an identity the first few weeks of the season,

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily...

In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.

Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim...

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can’t keep your mind off.

If we don’t act now to safeguard our privacy, we could all become victims of identity theft.

Apparently, a week Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime example of a “Yellow Peril”. Might Japan forever be stuck in a kind of no man’s land between East...

…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.

Rationalization is foreplay with one’s conscience.

What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to...

I have a secret secret admirer. Not only is her identity a secret—but so is the fact that she admires me.

If your name is Alex Andrew Aaron, and you are a straight-A student, is it because your initials are AAA, because your first middle, and last names are all first names, or because a business...

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.

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still...

I will be me,when world aberrantlywill feel, my gravity!I will turn into my,when their shrill crywill stop asking why!(Poem:Because you so wanna meet me, Book: Ginger and Honey)

…he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over...

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...

It is to geometry that we owe in some sort the source of this discovery [of beryllium]; it is that [science] that furnished the first idea of it, and we may say that without it...

Frightened that you’ll be overcome by yourself? That a gentle monster inside of you might take over and never let go?

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

(…) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes...

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our...

…tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation…. the window rosy with anemic November light.

Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

When you are clearly-defined, deliberate with intention and operating at your highest level, your brilliance cannot be hidden, diminished or overshadowed.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes...

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have – the ones given them by nature….. [S]he pointed...

I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went...

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, ‘What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?'” ‘The way I want...

You get olderand you are a whole mess of things,new thoughts, sorry feelings,big plans, enormous doubts,goling along hoping and getting disappointed,over and over again,no wonder I don’t recognizemy little crayon picture.It appears to be meand...

The ultimate barrier against love is the barrier of the constructed self.

He that commends me to mine own contentCommends me to the thing I cannot get.I to the world am like a drop of waterThat in the ocean seeks another drop,Who, falling there to find his...

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny….To work out our identity in God.

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

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

The easiest way to gain someone’s trust is to deserve it. This should be pretty easy, assuming you’re just being you and being real. Minimal effort too.

The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking...

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...

run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token…run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your...

exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.

We tend to view ourselves as this, lying in contradiction with everything that is not ourselves, that.

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