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.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their...

Until you are able to answer the question of self, you’ll still be living under someones shadows

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting...

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides.

It’s not a real name,” she says. “Not one that he’s carried with him always. It’s one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.

To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive…

I’ll never suppress my identity — that’s like filing away your fingerprints so the money can slide into your pockets easier.

I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of...

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at...

He was sorry for himself as well, for he was doomed to find life and identity in death letters.

Put it on record–I am an ArabAnd the number of my card is fifty thousandI have eight childrenAnd the ninth is due after summer.What’s there to be angry about?Put it on record.–I am an ArabWorking...

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that...

He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics.

With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them.The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger,...

We can witness collective movements alarmingly influenced by genuine social phobias and affecting the most industrialized and educated societies. Exclusive identities are being asserted, singular affiliations are being stressed, and it is becoming increasingly difficult...

My name is not Mara Dyer, but my lawyer told me I had to choose something. A pseudonym. A nom de plume, for all of us studying for the SATs. I know that having a...

I can be anything you want but definitely not a wannabe.

We owe ourselves our lives.

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up...

Remember who you really are. You cannot be destroyed or hurt. You cannot be harmed or killed. You, the real you, will always be present and powerful.

So now, when I look back, all I see is who we used to be and who we are now. And I wonder how anybody can recognize anyone at all.

Peter.” The fine hair along her spine rising, Vicky could feel the power in a name. This is who you are, it said. Come back to us.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It’s like I don’t want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random…that people are just molecules in the...

Throughout the ancient world, naming was a sacred act. It was the word by which a child was called into his calling. It was the voice of destiny, summoning the child into his future with...

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a...

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.

If you dont speak, they will know you know more than you’re telling them. And if they know that, they’ll find a way to get what you know out of you. Believe me, they’ll get...

Variety may be the spice of life, but consistency pays the bills.

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...

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive...

Knowing where you come from is just as important as knowing who you aren’t. You aren’t your own clone.

I understand perfectly. Darquesse isn’t a separate entity. She isn’t another person. She’s you. If you make the wrong choices, if you stop loving the people who love you, if you allow the world to...

Search not for happiness outside yourself, for nothing could be further from the truth.

Ladies, no matter how hard you try, a man will never complete you. Only God can. And if you don’t know your identity in Him, you’ll be lost forever.

same.” The past consistently becomes the present, not through linear time, but through the constant reconstruction and relabeling of it.

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What’s less, I’ve been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that...

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

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...

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women...

In the game we had here, they played an extremely aggressive game. They were still trying to find their identity. They’ve had some big wins, none bigger than Boston College last week.