Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

But I never looked like that!’ – How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it – by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where...

Can’t nobody make us do a thang once we git hard against it. And if anybody don’t like that, you don’t have to explain a thang to’m. All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte...

I don’t own you, you just belong to me.

Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of...

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...

The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay....

I think about how maybe it’s not things that change but people that change, and maybe that’s the change everyone is really talking about.

If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about US. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That...

a criminal sketch of Christon a diner napkin-‘Poet Prophets

keeping it real” when what they were really doing was taking the dead patriarchal protest of the black power movement and rearticulating it in forms that, though entertaining, had for the most part no transformative...

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so...

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.

The very fact that we need to struggle for approval proves that we do not approve of ourselves. Having to convince ourselves of something means we do not really believe it. That is why we...

The point, I decided, wasn’t to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can’t breathe very well in Ireland. He said...

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

I’m more a collector of identities and words that feel right to me. To me this is an inarguable point. I am who I say I am and that’s not up for debate.

I won’t tell you my name, but I will give you a number that describes me: 4. One a 1-10 scale, I love you like my numerical identity.

…modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the...

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this frequently; not between the inane idealism of the classroom and the stifling reality beyond it, which I must do for...

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener...

When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic’s parents couldn’t help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn’t help seeing...

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father,...

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

Salt water is and isn’t the ocean.

Time is the enemy of identity

He thought: that’s certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That’s how it happens that one fine day a person...

The players showed a lot of pride in their part to establish an identity we’re trying to form here,

I didn’t know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

I tried on different versions of myself. I was so many different girls…

We’ve kind of gotten into a little bit of a rhythm the last four weeks, more us. That identity was one that was very good for us last year, and we’ve been operating pretty good...

I am everything what u see and I can be anything what I want to be.

It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.

It’s toys, boy, all toys. You’ll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you’ll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what’s inside you...

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

At times it may seem as though you and your past are one. Sometimes we fail to differentiate between what has happened to us and who we are today. If you have a hard time...

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....

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by...

You’ll never know who you are unless you shed who you pretend to be.

Cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say, as I wear not motley in my brain.

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning...

Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear;...

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimesit looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar...

The more fucked up you are, the more I like you. As long as you’ve managed to hold onto your identity through all the shit, then it won’t matter how twisted you are. I will...

Facebook is the perfect place to try on different identities until she finds one that sticks.

Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us?

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don’t need to be wasted on naming things.

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...

That nagging state of constant thought that exists somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes is the self.