c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.
— bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the grandparents grieve because the garden represents something more than a resource to be divided. It is a symbol of community and beauty.
— Ken Follett, Winter of the World
I never get used to the faces--wide-eyed and full of possibility--staring bad at me.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Even the best buzz wears off, and you wake up more trapped than the day before.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
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.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
Boy or girl? I had never thought about that. The men who work at the palace, they use words to govern the country and use strength to protect it. Bringing all kinds of brilliant men from the kingdom, and they all have amazing talents. But...how are they different from me?The women inside the palace, they had white skin and beautiful hair. And their clothes were fashionable, their hearts were gentle and ever changing like the snow in the wind. But...how am I anything like them?
— Da Xia, 長歌行 3 [Chang Ge Xing 3]
My discontent has accumulated over the past months, searching for a leak in the dam I’ve constructed to separate my true feelings from the situation closing in around me.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
If I give you and apple and ask you, “What is that?”You reply, “An apple.”“How do you know it’s an apple.”“Because it just is.”“How did it get to be an apple?”“It came form an apple.”“Exactly. So when I ask you, ‘What are you?’ You can honestly say, ‘I am a child of God because I came from God.
— Toni Sorenson
Felt good, though, just being what I was.
— Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
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 fake name is strange, but trust me—it’s the most normal thing about my life right now. Even telling you this much probably isn’t smart. But without my big mouth, no one would know that a seventeen-year-old who likes Death Cab for Cutie was responsible for the murders. No one would know that somewhere out there is a B student with a body count. And it’s important that you know, so you’re not next.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
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 you don't really belong anywhere, because you are never sure of yourself ot those around you. You can't trust in anyone, their motives or their intentions. And because of that, you have, in a world that likes its shiny labels, no true identity.
— Gary Russell, The Twilight Streets
You have probably worked your entire life to create a sense of identity around your job, your family, your hobbies, or your physical characteristics. But none of these is who you really are. You are not what you look like. You are not your family. You are not your job, income, or performance. You are not your current situation or the mistakes you have made. Mistakes are just locations on your journey; they have nothing to do with who you are, and neither does what you do or how successful you are. You are bigger than all those things. You are much more than just a businessman or a mom or a student. You are a divine, irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind, amazing, loving, eternal being, and your value comes from that fact alone. You come from God, who is love, which to me would mean - you are love too. You have to be. And if you are love then nothing you do or don’t do can change your value, because no matter what you do or how many mistakes you make, you are still YOU; you are still LOVE. You can’t help it. You cannot be anything else.
— Kimberly Giles, Choosing Clarity: The Path to Fearlessness
Behind every face lies a mask. Behind it lies another onion layer of mask. If you peel the skins, you may cry.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
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 illusion and discovery.
— Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
You are who you are. Deal with it.
— H.M. Ward, Torn
Variety may be the spice of life, but consistency pays the bills.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
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.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
When compared side by side, my days can barely be distinguished from one another. The only difference is what I do after work and with whom I do it.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.
— Charles Stross, Accelerando
A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing," Grandma says. "You never know when she'll throw away a piece you may need...
— Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
No matter what you do, you are that girl. It's how you become that girl that matters.
— H.M. Ward, Torn
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.
— Sara Sheridan
Now I feel free, and hope is creeping back. Maybe because I'm paying attention to what I have rather than what's missing.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
There's nothing like an orgasm to force a person to think--and more often than not, to think too much.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
There's nothing like an orgasm to make a person think--and more often than not, to think too much.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Word has traveled quickly that just because you're on island doesn't mean you have to be stranded---as long as you have cash.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Rationalization is foreplay with one's conscience.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Our selves are are rough and unrehearsed tales we tell the world.
— William Alexander, Goblin Secrets
The child (mis)recognizes itself as a whole entity for the first time. It sees an image of itself as a unified person, an image which promises for the child that it will soon achieve full co-ordination of its body. The incoherent ‘hommelette’ sees an image of itself as an independent being and learns to identify with this image. This is when the ego (the sense of yourself as an individual) is formed. Thus, your sense of self is fundamentally bound up with an ‘exterior’ image. Instead of simply coming from within, your identity is formed out of a situation in which you see yourself for the first time from the outside. For Lacan this means that alienation and division are built into your identity from the outset. The result in adult life is that you are in a constant but fruitless state of desire for some mythical inner unity and stability to match the unity and stability you thought you saw in your childhood reflection. We spend our lives trying (and failing) to make ourselves ‘whole’.
— Glenn Ward
All that remains is to forge the #commitment. Regardless of how right everything feels, words never last.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.
— Walter Benjamin
Appearances can be deceiving, but the true colours of your soul remain.
— Angelica Hopes
The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.
— Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women
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 life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.(148)
— Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
We are identified and known by the sort of fruit, the quantity of fruit, and the quality of fruit borne out in our daily conversation, conduct, and character. There is no greater criterion for Christians. It is the paramount gauge of God's people.
— W. Phillip Keller
Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.
— Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing
I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.
— Amy Leach, Things That Are
...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse
Social class positioning influences all aspects of everyday interaction – how to talk, if to talk and when, whom to trust, whether or not to plan or risk, what can or cannot be done, how to belong, and who to be. Of course, how people respond to these social interactions depends on how social class intersects with the meanings and practices associated with other significant sociocultural categories (gender, race, ethnicity, age, cohort, religion, geography, sexual orientation) that also influence psychological tendencies.
— Susan T. Fiske, Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction
I felt good that, although there was no future, there would always be a past.
— Stephen Reid, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden
Everyone has a unique problem of their own, an issue that follows them throughout life and never goes away. You discover it early and go on to struggle with it for the rest of your life, almost until it eventually becomes an old enemy that you lose the will to fight or hate anymore. And just as every person has their own void, their own haunt or their own unanswered question...they also have the power to turn it into a legacy every bit as profound as they make it.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “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 you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.
— M.R. Graham, The Medium
Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.
— Eric Metaxas
(...) 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 (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Being who you are for ever is the price you pay for im­mor­tal­ity.
— Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
— Willard Van Orman Quine, Theories and Things
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 on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural.
— Tom Clancy, The Cardinal of the Kremlin
If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for a moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.
— Aldous Huxley
the man eventually becomes what he dreams of"By T. Afsin Ilgar - Ted`s Tale
— T. Afsin Ilgar
Maybe the hardened clay was not as ugly as I had thought. Maybe what I resented was the color my father had painted me. The time had come to sand away some of that dreadful stain.
— Zohreh Ghahremani, Sky of Red Poppies
My best works are for me. Not for the world.
— Anirudh Arun, The Steadfast Tin Soldier?
The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.
— George F. Will, One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation
When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
[Caine]"Interesting. Me, I've always wanted to know who my real parents were."[Sam]"Let me guess: you're secretly a wizard who was raised by muggles.
— Michael  Grant, Gone
Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar...
— Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike.I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Love holds no expectation on what you will be, it simply values who you are.
— E'yen A. Gardner, Love Letters
Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.
— Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy
Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.
— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.
— Sean Wilsey, Oh the Glory of it All
You get to decide what to worship.
— David Foster Wallace
The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world.
— Hal Zina Bennett, Spirit Circle
He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An ID number is only there to 'identify' human beings. Use it to assume people’s intellect or wisdom at your own risk.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Death is not like going to sleep, it's more like waking up from a dream and realizing the person you were in the dream wasn't you, the problems you had in the dream weren't your problems and waking up from the dream to this world is like going back to sleep again and waking up in a dream world, forgetting who we are again and getting lost in the dream character, the character who we think we are and who has problems. Waking up in a dream and realizing we are not the dream character but the dreamer is enlightenment.
— Emmanuel Diogu
I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn't tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian's and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn't wracked with anxiety when there aren't any boys around. And she doesn't need them to live, which is what it feels like for me.
— Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.
— Rose Tremain
And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae. So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage. Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.
— Marlene Van Niekerk, Agaat
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me...
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply anencounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.
— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
We’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience.
— Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Alice’s razor-thin blond hair is what people in Santo Domingo call bueno, but I don’t understand how that kind of hair can be good. It doesn’t move at all, or ripple like the water in Boca Chica when I throw shells at it.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles.So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.
— Barbara Browning
I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.
— Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts
Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?
— Slash Coleman, The Bohemian Love Diaries: A Memoir
I haven’t been disingenuous in what I’ve said describing my perception of “truth” and “reality.” Certainly, I understand what is generally meant to be the “truth,” I understand this notion, but it’s not something I trust in, OK?The only answer that feels true (I said feels, not is) is that yes, the character Minnie is me, but she is not me. She is a projection of some tumult which originates within me, but she is not me. I use elements of myself, including my likeness, for the character, perhaps as Cindy Sherman uses herself in her work, but like Sherman’s photographs, the work itself is not any more about the creator than it is about everyone. I won’t deny that Minnie does things I have done, and that things happen to her that have happened to me, but she, unlike me, having been created, is who she is and will remain so, unchanged now. I make no attempt to create “documentary.” There is a process of dissociation that takes place when I make a story, I make creative decisions in a fugue state that I could hardly describe to you, but the end result is, I hope, a story with some meaning or resonance, something created, with a beginning, a middle and an end, an encapsulation of feeling and impression, but in no way a documentary of anything other than an “emotional truth.”If I told most interviewers that my work is “true” and that it is based on real events that occurred in my life, they would more readily accept this than they do the explanation I try to give. Sadly, what they would believe feels to me like a lie and a simplification of a process that is for me as complex and vague as life itself…
— Phoebe Gloeckner
Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
How do you eat your roots?
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
Sometimes it seems my identity’s a matter of opinion
— Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
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 who he didn't want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a blur if you want, but Dawn didn't see a blur. She saw a very distinct, very clear person.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.
— Jared Taylor
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 soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
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.
— Laura Resau, The Queen of Water
It turns out that knowing how loved we are by God makes all the difference in the kind of people we will become.
— Jonathan Martin
Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
— Octavia E. Butler, Imago
Identity is your role in life, the part you play. Individuality is who you are, and who you are is revealed to you if you can get to complete presence.
— Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters
Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person."What kind of person, he wanted to know."Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life."He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're the kind of person who never stops trying.
— Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air
We do not behave out of our identity, we behave out of our understanding of our identity in Christ.
— Shelley Hendrix, On Purpose for a Purpose
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
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
In a world full of cynics, critics, and competitors, we get to choose instead to be cheerleaders for others.
— Shelley Hendrix, Why Can't We Just Get Along?: 6 Effective Skills for Dealing with Difficult People
If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.
— Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
Even in our own lives, we often struggle with a God who is real, who created us, who cares for us, and desires to know us. Yet from the start, God has made clear that you and I are made in his image, on purpose and for a purpose.
— Dillon Burroughs
You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
— Paul Auster, Winter Journal
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
— Zadie Smith, NW
Remember that every person who you come into contact to on any given day has a story that is probably far more amazing than you will imagine and no one is going to just offer up their entire life's worth of experiences to you because you want them to. It takes time to draw someone's story out from within them. It takes trust. It takes sincerity and dedication. Keep in mind that each and every interaction you have with all those people on a daily basis is a unique opportunity to develop any kind of relationship with that person that the two of you might want to be a part of. It doesn't matter how you meet them or what it is that you do with them. It can be as mundane as waving to them in the morning as they leave their driveway, or it can be as huge as saving someone's life in a moment of uncertainty and sacrifice. Each person has the potential to become a friend or a lover or to simply teach you something important and then slip back into the endless rush of other bodies moving about the planet around us. Don't pass these chances up too often, or you'll get lost in the tide yourself.
— Ashly Lorenzana
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Lovers are not snails
—  they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.
An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy...If I try self consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.
— Sonia Sotomayor
So, Eva Nine, you must sometimes disregard what someone is saying and focus instead on what they are doing. Watch and observe. That is when one reveals his true self.
— Tony DiTerlizzi, A Hero For WondLa
When you know who you are, you know what to do.
— Shelley Hendrix, Why Can't We Just Get Along?: 6 Effective Skills for Dealing with Difficult People
Our identity has already been chosen for us; but it is up to us to accept it, or fight and change it.
— Afnan Ahmad Mia
But Sir Alistair’s gaze was different. Those other men had looked at her with lust or speculation or crass curiosity, but they hadn’t been looking at her really. They’d been looking at what she represented to them: physical love or a valuable prize or an object to be gawked at. When Sir Alistair stared at her, well, he was looking at her.
— Elizabeth Hoyt, To Beguile a Beast
Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming.
— Epeli Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works
...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Our identity is like that of an onion; with each experience we endure, a layer is peeled away, finally revealing who we really are at the core.
— Afnan Ahmad Mia
Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.
— Amy Hill Hearth, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society
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?
— Cecil Castellucci, Rose Sees Red
...you became lost in the maze of me - forgive me Love, for keeping you close...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.
— Anne Rice, Lasher
You can't change who you are, can you? That would require changing the people who made you along the way. That would mean discrediting everything they ever gave you.
— Rose Christo, Unborn: Three Short Stories
I don't like this, Toua," I go on. "We're like birds that have flown a very long way from their nest. We're like nettles in a garden full of hops. We shouldn't have to hide who we are. Our faces are unseen.
— Rose Christo, Unborn: Three Short Stories
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.
— Tanya Huff, Blood Trail
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 twist and turn and change you, then yes, the future we've seen will come to pass. But if you fight, and if you kick, and struggle, and refuse to give in to the apathy, or the anger, or the hopelessness, then you'll change the future, and you'll walk your own path. And I'll be right there beside you, Valkyrie. I'll always be beside you.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.From within, I couldn't decide what to do.Unable to see, I heard my name being called.Then I walked outside.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
— Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill
Don't say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals 'fine choice.
— Jessica Hagedorn The Gangster of Love
Everything is music for the born musician.
— Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe: Dawn, Morning, Youth, Revolt
At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.
— Amy Reed, Beautiful
You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
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 who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.
— Kunal  Sen
Being human makes us one. Being uniquely ourselves makes us individual." - Nancy S. Mure, Author of Unidentical Twins
— Nancy S.  Mure
We live in one world together. It's more important than ever to be friend to all.
— Elizabeth Miyu Blake, GreenBean: True Blue Family
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 with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home.
— Tania James
Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.
— Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
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.
— Deborah N. Kabwang, Secrets Buried in the Soul
His [(Rumpelstiltskin)] feeling that his name, which is his identity, must be kept secret, or else he'll be revealed to the world as the hunchbacked, shriveled, ridiculous creature he knows himself to be. And if that happens, he'll disappear.
— Joan Gould, Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life
Cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say, as I wear not motley in my brain.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
To create myself from nothing.
— S.J. Watson
People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
— Kazuo Ishiguro
a criminal sketch of Christon a diner napkin-'Poet Prophets
— Amber Koneval, Drunk Dialing the Divine
They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.
— Tania James, Aerogrammes: and Other Stories
. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.We can't be anything we want to be.We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles