All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead...

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do...

And this is when I knew I was black for real.This is when I knew black was a citywhose walls were constantly under siege….

There is, however, one way of speaking that I’ve tried to avoid. Rather than refer to someone as “a homosexual,” I’ve taken care always to make “gay” or “homosexual” the adjective, and never the noun,...

…that it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

All pain in life comes from suppressing your true identity.

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for...

I’ve never been impulsive. It’s always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that...

I’ve wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn’t change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I...

I’m like a fish in a pool, turning quickly to avoid what challenges it. My only decision is whether to go right or left to sidestep confrontation.

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist…I am a person who does those things.

… so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the...

Socialism provides safety in numbers. And that’s OK, if you don’t mind trading your name—your identity and individualism—for a number.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

How do you know you are who you are? How do you know you’re not simply a clone of who you think you are?

Oh come on, smile. Lisa, Jack… being bisexual is hardly a crime. Best of both worlds, isn’t it?’And Ianto pushed her away. ‘No,Gwen. No, really it’s bloody not. It’s the worst of any world because...

Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that...

People might consider you eccentric for being different, but this is good. Leaders and visionaries are not conformists afraid of standing out.

You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You...

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you...

I see that if you try to fit someone in a box, she might slip through the seams like water and become her own river.

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

Behind every face lies a mask. Behind it lies another onion layer of mask. If you peel the skins, you may cry. ―

Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.And that is, more or less, everything...

Being human makes us one. Being uniquely ourselves makes us individual.” – Nancy S. Mure, Author of Unidentical Twins

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...