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.

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...

Ja nie jestem, mnie nie ma, ja dopiero będę.

The world put’s too much emphasis on what a person does in terms of monetary value and social status as opposed to who they are. If I was to ask you if you would be...

Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.

Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence...

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don’t chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do...

I’m old enough to have lived in a country where, if you were willing to work hard, you could have a fairly nice life. You could support your family, and even get a shot at...

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...