c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Even at such a tender age, I knew that life is lived in leftovers, account ledgers, and timetables rather than in the Platonic sphere of perfect theory. I couldn't float sylphlike around Love Hall in the flowing robes of indeterminacy for the rest of my life, however much I wished there to be no change. I had to accept my responsibilities and, at least in the eyes of the world and at least for the time being, nail my colors to a mast. Unless I wished to appear a strange wonder for the rest of time, caked in circus makeup covering the truth inches beneath, the mast would be male.
— Wesley Stace, Misfortune
Islam is simple, but being a Muslim in a modern world is not. Everyday is a battle that each of us have to face. It is easy to get swept away and lose one's identity. The constant struggle is to find out who we are and how to remain steadfast.
— Norhafsah Hamid, Trying to be Muslim
She isn't like any of the girls I ever knew, or any of the girls I was myself.
— L.M. Montgomery
When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
I must be myself, I said over and over. I must forget these people buzzing inside my head, I must forget their voices, their smells, their demands, their love, their hate, and be myself, I must be myself, I told myself, as i gazed down at the legs resting so happily on the stool, and I told myself again as I looked up to watch the smoke I'd blown up to the ceiling; I must be myself, because if I failed to be myself, I become the person they wanted me to be; if I had to be that insufferable person, I'd rather be nothing at all. It would be better if I didn't exist,...
— Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Now, think of a square, a living, beautiful square. And imagine that it must tell you about itself, about its life. You understand, a square would scarcely ever think of telling you that all its four angles are equal: this has become so natural, so ordinary to it that it's simply no longer consciously aware of it. And so with me: I find myself continually in this square's position.
— Zamyatin Yevgeny
Identity is the role you chose to play in the story of the Universe.
— Maria V Shall
If you think you can stand to know what you’re made of, try kneeling before God.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Through “posts” and “sharing,” by exhibiting one’s loves and tastes, personal stories, photos, and more, each “curates” a public image of oneself on the web, to which one then continually strives to conform. Personal identity becomes one’s reflection in the others’ eyes.
— Nicos Hadjicostis
I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.
— Mark Twain, Corn Pone Opinions
When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. Once act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
What does it mean when I say that 'I don't see race?' It means that because I learned to see no difference between 'white' and 'color,' I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both.
— Michi Trota
I know I'm good but I'm also a poser. That's artistic balance! In the second half of the century, "authenticity" would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors. Put on the work shirt, young man. No big deal. As you get older, it won't concern you. It's just the lay of the land. In your youth, however, you are easy prey for the many tricks of the mind. At this moment, I know my mid is not at its most centered. I can tell because I'm afraid, and that's not my style; I don't need to be, but I am.
— Bruce Springsteen
I may not believe in sin,” he said, “but I do feel guilt. We Shadowhunters live by a code, and that code isn’t flexible. Honor, fault, penance, those are real to us, and they have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with who we are. This is who I am, Clary," he said desperately.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
I think that's the hardest part about mistakes: Sometimes the consequences aren't physical. Sometimes they simply chip away at the essence of who you are.
— Tammy L. Gray, My Hope Next Door
We are not defined by the things we accumulate, but by the memories we impart.
— Philip Olivier
Now do you understand why it's so important for you to grasp your belovedness? God won't change the world through angels or through ideas; He will change the world through His sons and daughters. If you don't know who you are, if you don’t know your true identity, you won't touch others on His behalf.
— Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?
It seems to be almost a law of human nature, that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they,” the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.
— Richard Flanagan
Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, it's like which is me and which is the role? Where's the line between me and my shadow?
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible. It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
What does it mean to not be hidden from the eyes of God even in the womb? What does it say about God that He "beheld [David’s] unformed substance"? Alone in the field, far removed in both space and time from the overwhelming voices we contend with every day, David came to a remarkable revelation: He was loved simply because he existed.
— Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?
Not every good thing in life will remain forever
— kayser U
We are the estranged orphans of our nations and tribes, and we now bear the weight not of survival of the group but of personal identity.
— Chris Matakas, The Tao of Jiu Jitsu
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
— Jonathan Safran Foer
The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion.
— Leo Tolstoy
It's funny how you can become something merely by forgetting who you once were.
— Chrissy Moon, Gems of Strength
a square is not just about light, air, proportion, and people. It must also give form to some shared notion of civic identity. [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].
— Catie Marron, City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.
— A.L. Kennedy
I had been thinking a lot about how the media has created this complex, fictionalized cartoon version of me, you know, this man-eating, jet-setting serial dater who reels them in, but scares them off because she’s clingy and needy; then she’s all dejected, so she goes into her lair and writes a song as a weapon. I mean, man, that’s pretty intense. And I started thinking about what an interesting character that person is. And, if I was that person, what would my life motto be, my mantra? What would I say? I think I’d own it.
— Taylor Swift
Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.
— Reid Hoffman, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.
— Kōbō Abe, The Box Man
A group of us were downtown on Bay Street. It was some twelve to fifteen of us with nothing to do. We had just been in a fight with some Kemp Road fellas. It really wasn’t anything to talk about, because we quickly ran them off Bay Street. Feeling pumped up about what we had just done and looking for more action, we started running in the middle of Bay Street, screaming and shouting ‘Rebellions!” and ‘Raiders for life!”, making a real nuisance of ourselves. About nine of us were arrested by the police and charged with public terror and disorderly behavior. So in fact, we were given our gang name by the police, and Milton Street became known as the Public Terrorist Rebellions. Galen ‘Ninja’ Nordelus former leader of the Public Terrorist Rebellions through Milton Street.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
The Rebellions were the first gang in The Bahamas, to come up with a popular logo/brand in the wearing of Raiders clothing. However, other neighborhoods gave birth to their own gangs using popular sporting team images as their official colors and name. You had the Hoyas Bull Dogs out of Kemp Road; the Coconut Grove area took on the name Nike, which became their clothing of choice. Miami Street took on the name Hurricanes, and wore Miami Hurricanes clothing. However, when you look at it closely, because of the lack of involved fathers, a lot of us were simply lacking an image and a positive identity of ourselves.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.
— Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I’m touching, so I’d better start paying attention to what I’m touching.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Whether you are married or have lived with someone for a time, look upon that person and know that, as much as you may love that individual, he or she is not your "better half." Yes, this popular term of this endearment can be a warm, comforting notion that speaks to intimacy and trust. but these people you care about so deeply aren't "half" of you at all. They do not fill in your blanks. You have no blanks. You are whole within yourself.
— Larry Ackerman, The Identity Code: The 8 Essential Questions for Finding Your Purpose and Place in the World
You can't always choose which. Sometimes you have to BE which.
— Jonathan R. Miller
Do we have Your Mark 10:39 faith that You will complete what You have begun in us? Or, do we look at our faltering desires and despair or excuse? Let us, Lord Jesus, hear Your Word over us more clearly and emphatically than we hear our own projections. Our predictions come from walking by sight, and they are SO often wrong that we ought to abandon them out of sheer practicality.
— Brian Eshleman
You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.
— China Miéville, This Census-Taker
Hell, is trying to do what you can't do, trying to be what you're not
— Anzia Yezierska
Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
Don't be afraid to be exactly as awesome as you were created to be.
— Rev. Kellen Roggenbuck
I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.
— Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First
But Krishna was a chameleon.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you're with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved."--Tennessee Williams, "Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
— James Grissom
You think you must fit the role others have laid out for you. That is the lie you need to conquer.
— Elizabeth Carlton, The Royal Rogue
She thinks she is white,' they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.
— Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
We can think of dissociation as psychological disconnection from one or more of three major spheres of experience: (a) the here and now, i.e., orientation to time and place; (b) other people, i.e., interpersonal communion; and (c) one’s own subjective experience, e.g., visceral sensation, physical pain, affect, or sense of identity. The various manifestations of pathological dissociation e.g., amnesia, depersonalization, identity fragmentation–can be understood as manifestations of these dimensions of disconnection.
— Steven N. Gold
We can name this river, here and now—but we cannot name the water itself. We can name our gods and we can name ourselves, but we cannot name the essence of sacred identity that flows through both, that connects us and sanctifies us." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective
— John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans
Our choices define who we are when we make them. Therefore, we always have the power to change and choose who we are.
— Eda Dagli
If we really want to know, who we are and recognize our identity, we have to find out the identity of the others. By making friends with the others, we are able to make friends with ourselves. At that moment, we can sense how everything falls into place. ( “ Steps in the unknown" )
— Erik Pevernagie
And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?
— Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
From: bluegreen118@gmail.com To: hourtohour.notetonote@gmail.comDate: Jan 7 at 7:23 AMSubject: Re: Really?On the Tumblr-you mean creeksecrets? .....But I really don't think I'm wrong. Jacques a dit. Right?-BlueSo, Yeah, I've been careless. I guess I left a trail of clues. and I shouldn't be surprised that Blue put them together. Maybe I kind of wanted him to.Jacques a dit is "Simon Says" in French, by the way, And it's obviously not as clever as I thought it was.
— Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
Sometimes we represent our weakness as if it were bad. We don’t think it’s okay to be weak…We have been injured in many ways and our real self houses all of the evidence of those injuries. The pain, the brokenness and the emotional underdevelopment we all possess is part of who we really are.
— Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal: How to Understand the Past to Ensure a Healthier Future
Sometimes I feel that I am destined for greater things, and then again sometimes I suspect that I am just an extra in an epic movie.
— Shon Mehta
he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate
— Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Identity was just a box people liked to put themselves in, a mast to tether to in a storm, a security blanket.
— Leonardo Donofrio, Old Country
9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?No. No. No.
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
It was things like that I remembered about Ruby, the incongruity, the struggle to find herself.No matter what she wore though she was always Ruby, always herself.
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
I'm a name and a question.
— Paul Tremblay, The Little Sleep
He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yet, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.
— Tim Parks
The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.
— Prageeta Sharma
Dear GIRLS your very own identity is more important than a marriage certificate.
— Amit Abraham
But since Kurdistan did not, as such, exist; since it was an imaginary land, stretching over scraggy mountains and deep valleys in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; since they were as landless as the Palestinians and as nameless as the Liberians, the Kurds didn't really exist either, and so, officially, they were Turks.
— Sophie Hardach, The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages
I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification. I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)
— Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human
By looking for the unexpected and discerning the surreptitious features in the scenery within us, we apprehend our personality, find out our identity and learn how to cultivate it. Taking care of our fingerprints will be an enduring endeavor. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.
— Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land
[I]t is something that comes up as a struggle in me. It especially came up when I was about 16 or 17. In high school people think you have to be so macho. People get attacked just because someone insinuates something about their sexuality. I think that’s gruesome.
— Green Day
...we are the whole life that we have lived, its highs and lows, its fortunes and its hardships; we are the sum of the ghosts that haunt us...
— Yasmina Khadra, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit
The child I wasis just one breath away from me.
— Sheniz Janmohamed, Firesmoke
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.
— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you’re not good enough because they can’t understand who you are.
— Barbara Sher, Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams
Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past.
— Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World
My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound.My mind, I hope, will soon be found.
— Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me
I am not myself.My thoughts are tangled in words that are not my own.
— Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.
— Himani Bannerji
the same—on this page, or the end of your fingertips—always the same
— John J. Geddes
A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.
— Nancy Horan
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
— Russell Banks
What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
— John Gardner, Grendel
A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.
— Élisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women
It wasn’t just heartbreaking but it broke my identity! All that anguish that was deep hidden in me because rejections from family and friends started to pour out like a current in the sea that would seem destructive.
— Santosh Avvannavar, She: Ekla Cholo Re
How much of my body is really me? My face is me, for sure. Anyone who looked at my face would know it was me. (...) But after that? If I showed myself a picture of myself from the shoulders down, would I be sure it was me? (...) I close my eyes and ask myself what my feet look like. I only kind of know. (...)I let it define me, but I can't even define it.
— David Levithan, Another Day
When we own our beliefs, we have clear boundaries. We know what we believe and we know what others believe. There is no confusion. Our identity is strong to us and everyone else.
— Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind
The test of a sword is not its polish but its temper
— Elizabeth Moon
For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.
— Élisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women
On the surface, we come to understand that who we are is something separate from all other objects in the world. This is the first and primary of illusions we are taught to believe after having been welcomed to the human world. I do not use the word “illusion” in a negative sense, but in a necessary one. Just as the enjoyment of a film or theatrical play may depend upon the ability of the actors to woo the audience into believing the world they are portraying; the enjoyment of life may also be found in our own ability to wield the power of illusion.
— Saunsea
No sooner is there a good thing in the world, than a division is necessary.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
If you enjoy sex or explore aspects of your sexual identity using technology, that experience should belong to you. Only you should get to decide whether it was a good or bad thing to do.
— Violet Blue, The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy
All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame
— Alice Pung, Laurinda
My identity is not it, which given by the community. my identity is my natural mask.
— MH Mahdi
He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that he had to speak. But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.
— John  Williams
This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn’t understand what they meant for a long, long time.
— Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son
Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was imagining alternative-universe versions of myself. Sometimes I was a rosy-cheeked outdoorsy girl who ate flowers and hiked alone, uphill, for miles. Or I was a skydiving, drag-racing, adrenaline-fueled daredevil. Or a chain mail-wearing, sword swinging dragon slayer. It was fun to imagine those things because I already knew who I was. Now I don't know anything. I don't know who I'm supposed to be in my new world.
— Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
— William Faulkner
The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.
— Breyten Breytenbach, Intimate Stranger
Often the question of, "Who am I?" should be answered with, "Whose am I?
— Matt      Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church
Throw away the servility of imitation, and rise to the manliness of originality.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
— Roberto Bolaño
The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there.
— Margaret Wheatley
Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.
— Milan Kundera, Identity
I'd like to say I'm not self-absorbed compared to others, but that's hard to say since I'm far too self-absorbed to pry into others' self-absorption.
— Anonymous
What I wasn’t expecting was the euphoria once my body began releasing endorphins. The mixture of pain and pleasure was ecstasy. Getting my tattoo introduced me to secret, dark pleasures. I would always be a marked prisoner, but I was a liberated soul.
— Scarlet Risque, Red Hourglass
In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling "his twoness-- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.
— Ron Suskind, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.
— James     Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I'd never known I'd had.I was no longer following a trail.I was learning to follow myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
You express yourself through written words. You’re a writer.
— Tara Sue Me, The Exhibitionist
It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.
— Maryse Condé, Victoire: My Mother's Mother
It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.
— Maryse Condé
Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn’t. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn’t help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.
— Bianca Scardoni, Inception
But nobody writes fairy talesabout the ugly and poemsare not there for the brokenand I will never find myselfin the words of a hymnnor will any whispered prayerever say my name(which name, which meam I looking for?)because I am shoutingat a cross splintered into piecesby my angry fists, and cryingat the stained glass fallinglike killing rain around me.
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
I want her sinful arms wrapped around me,bloodied and angry and triumphant in shame.
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.
— Stephen Vincent Benét
By day I am nothing, by night I am I.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?'…'I don't agree
— Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
You do not need an identity to become yourself
—  you need an identity to become -like- someone else.
I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be?
— Ralph Ellison
In July I thinkabout the idea of being cursed(because it’s not strange to me;when I look in mirrors I’mnot there, blank walls gleamingwith bloody condensation,and my shadow behind memocking me with his persistencewhen I keep telling himto leave just to leave to let me be).
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
In May I keep count.Two and a half more days of school
— five between exams.Twenty thousand words of a noveland four poems and six borrowed books.More numbers to add to counting my pillsand trying to work out how to stay awake.
I cut off all my hair, cut awayat the soft curves of my clothinguntil I have edges once again,using my body like broken glassto slice at the world around me.I have to take something back,because I have nothing more to
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
All your life has been a journey to find an identity.
— Larry Kramer, Faggots
This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.
— Rudyard Kipling
We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
— Chang-rae Lee
Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
I killed it," Athan lamented. "I am a fool." His righteous anger, his arguments, his adoration for the being who claimed Eldaloth's name faded and disintegrated with all the suffering life behind him. A poisonous dread seeped as deep into his soul as the exultant honor and pride he had felt just minutes before. The vast gap between the two emotions a crater into which his very soul plummeted in free-fall.
— Brian K. Fuller, Sacrifice
The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.
— Chris Campanioni, Tourist Trap
I cannot love my neighbour as myselfbecause you bid me do him no harm,and I cannot love my enemiesbecause they keep crawling inside meand tearing out all my emotions:if I am made in your image then youare not somebody I want to seebecause why believe in the broken,why depend on the weak,why seek the lost and bewilderedwhose only answer is “please”?
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
Some people unfold into a thousand wordsand others never speak to me at all,never take the blame at all,never look at me at all – I wonder whyhe never looks at me at all (perhapshe cannot bear to meet my eyes).
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.
— Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren’t meant to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.
— Kate Bornstein, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws
She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
There comes a time when you just have to say, “No!” – to the requests and to the system.
— Fennel Hudson, Wild Carp - Fennel's Journal - No. 4
She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.
— Robin McKinley, Chalice
Am I on your page?" Jesse asked.Rosie knew Jesse liked her, loved her, maybe, but this was not about that."Yes," Rosie said, making eye contact with Jesse. "How could you not be on my page? ... (But) even though we are on the same page, we see the page differently," Rosie had continued, enjoying the moment, "my page -- which I admit you are on -- is not the page that you think you are on. You will never see the page the same as me. You cannot look through my eyes and see what I see.
— Denny Taylor, Rosie's Umbrella
Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.
— Amin Maalouf
Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality
— Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
Reverend Harper: Have you ever tried to persuade him that he wasn't Teddy Roosevelt?Abby Brewster: Oh, no.Martha Brewster: Oh, he's so happy being Teddy Roosevelt.Abby Brewster: Oh... Do you remember, Martha, once, a long time ago, we thought if he'd be George Washington, it might be a change for him, and we suggested it.Martha Brewster: And do you know what happened? He just stayed under his bed for days and wouldn't be anybody.
— Joseph Kesselring
Wouldn’t a no one do as well as a someone about whom nothing can be said?
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
We usually don't realize the thing that is defining our identity until that thing is taken away.
— Tim Hiller, Strive: Life is Short, Pursue What Matters
You may know me... But you have no idea who I am...
— Lily Fulljames
Choice is the mortar that binds together the things that make us who we are.
— Fennel Hudson, Wild Carp - Fennel's Journal - No. 4
People always say how you should be yourself. Like yourself is a definite thing, like a toaster or something.
— Angela Chase (Claire Danes)
You can be many things if you are British and still belong.
— Robert Hillman, Joyful
Only the one who recognizes his power in Jesus Christ can build a strong team.
— Sunday Adelaja
The reason why man seeks for happiness is not because happiness is his sustenance, but because happiness is his own being; therefore in seeking for happiness, man is seeking for himself.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time?
— Franz Kafka
As I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you."I said, "She never has.
— Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
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 with comrades of toil in a quarry.I have eight childernFor them I wrest the loaf of bread,The clothes and exercise booksFrom the rocksAnd beg for no alms at your doors,--Lower not myself at your doorstep.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.I am a name without a tide,Patient in a country where everythingLives in a whirlpool of anger.--My roots--Took hold before the birth of time--Before the burgeoning of the ages,--Before cypess and olive trees,--Before the proliferation of weeds.My father is from the family of the plough--Not from highborn nobles.And my grandfather was a peasant--Without line or genealogy.My house is a watchman's hut--Made of sticks and reeds.Does my status satisfy you?--I am a name without a surname.Put it on Record.--I am an Arab.Color of hair: jet black.Color of eyes: brown.My distinguishing features:--On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh--Scratching him who touches it.My address:--I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,--Its streets without name--And all its men in the fields and quarry.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.You stole my forefathers' vineyards--And land I used to till,--I and all my childern,--And you left us and all my grandchildren--Nothing but these rocks.--Will your government be taking them too--As is being said?So!--Put it on record at the top of page one:--I don't hate people,--I trespass on no one's property.And yet, if I were to become starved--I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.--Beware, beware of my starvation.--And of my anger!
— Mahmoud Darwish
I do the splits perfectly in PE. I lose half a pound in two days. I get the spinach and pig-meat frittata from the lo-carb section for lunch. And no-one else knows. I mentally construct a MyFace status, polishing the memories carefully until they shine. The need to record my life is as fundamental as my need to breathe. Without MyFace, I'm floating. I have nothing to anchor me down, to prove I exist.
— Louise O'Neill
If mistakes determine our worth, then we're all worthless.Thank God that's not the case.
— Andrena Sawyer