c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She waited with Billy Slick while Carrot went on the errand, and for something to say, she said, ‘Billy Slick doesn’t sound much like a goblin name?’ Billy made a face. ‘Too right! Granny calls me Of the Wind Regretfully Blown. What kind of name is that, I ask you? Who’s going to take you seriously with a name like that? This is modern times, right?’ He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human – human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls... the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others. 
— Stefan Petrucha, Ripper
Frankly, I believe that identity is what's inside us.
— Theo Coster, We All Wore Stars: Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates
Be the person you really are and not the person you'e allowed yourself to become," Kate said to Nikki. From 'Life Song
— Christine M. Knight
By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Patriarchal hip-hop ushered in a world where black males could declare that they were “keeping it real” when what they were really doing was taking the dead patriarchal protest of the black power movement and rearticulating it in forms that, though entertaining, had for the most part no transformative power, no ability to intervene on the politics of domination, and turn the real lives of black men around.
— bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson's memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity.
— Chris Hedges
So the being grows rings
—  identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose--so it seems.
Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless—a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
No one knows who they are more than someone who changes their identity (before I became a farmer, I was a leadership coach).
— M.C. Humphreys
Only me, eh? Is that how you see yourself? Only you is worth a good deal more than you think.
— Gabriel King, The Wild Road
I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. "I could teach them Indian folk dances," I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments."Well, I'm not sure that they would be complex enough for competitions," she said. Pursing her lips, she blushed a dark, deep red. I knew I had said something wrong, but it took me a few days to understand the reason for Miss Manson's disapproval and discomfort. She blushed a beetroot red because I had unwittingly questioned the core belief of the school: British was Better.
— Nayana Currimbhoy, Miss Timmins' School for Girls
Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.
— Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home
Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity
— Amin Maalouf
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
— Paul Valéry
Yesterday Allison bought me nail polish in the annoying shade of mauve. How can anyone look at me and think mauve?
— Katie McGarry, Dare You To
You know I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat. You know I adopted straight from the ASPCA, you feel me? Just breaking the boundaries, man, showing everybody it’s okay to be yourself. Embrace yourself. Embrace your health. Ayyy! Just continue to love yourself and accept.
— Brandon McCartney
I was bi and my heart was off-limits to no one, at least not for any reason like what they had between their legs or whether their chests were flat or round. And maybe because of that I never really could believe or understand that Griff, or anyone else, could be deterred from falling in love by such a trivial thing as gender.
— Ben Monopoli, The Cranberry Hush
How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.
— Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda
Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.
— Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays
Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.
— Milan Kundera, Identity
What you have now then is the marketing of racialized identities as tools for consumption. And certain racialized bodies and images are associated with hipness, coolness, edginess. So all kinds of youth all over the world are appropriating that style as a way of, sort of, countering authority, stating their rebelliousness, and wanting to be seen as significant.
— Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think. 
— bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours.
— Nihad Sirees
black identities are diverse and complex…
— bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem
In her dream each of the people assembled around her looked like several others, whom she recognized, only they weren't gradually transformed from one into the other but each of them seemed to be inside the others simultaneously and one of them shone through another. And something else was inside them as well, something unexplainable which wasn't within any of them, whose sum total they appeared to be, and this was what fascinated her above all.
— Věra Linhartová
Regardless of how your life will impact others and what that will look like, I just know that when your identity is grounded in God, when you trust in Him, you become part of a bigger picture. And you begin to live out this wonderful poem He has written for your life. This is the truth when life is smooth sailing, and this is the truth when storms come.
— Tim Tebow, Shaken: Discovering Your True Identity in the Midst of Life's Storms
Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.
— Marisha Pessl
It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up -- if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else' -- but, oh, dear!
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.
— Justin Torres, We the Animals
The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of the individuals. Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition.
— Anna Deavere Smith
The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.
— Harold Nicholson
In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories
I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.
— Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
There is, however, one way of speaking that I've tried to avoid. Rather than refer to someone as "a homosexual," I've taken care always to make "gay" or "homosexual" the adjective, and never the noun, in a longer phrase, such as "gay Christian" or "homosexual person." In this way, I hope to send a subtle linguistic signal that being gay isn't the most important thing about my or any other gay person's identity. I am a Christian before I am anything else. My homosexuality is a part of my makeup, a facet of my personality. One day, I believe, whether in this life or in the resurrection, it will fade away. But my identity as a Christian - someone incorporated into Christ's body by his Spirit - will remain.
— Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality
Shall I be'her'?
— Colin Clark, My Week With Marilyn
I wish I knew who I am," I whispered to the stars in Baya's eyes.Slowly, Baya shook his head. "Oh, Dust Girl, that's the hardest wish of all. Not even Baya can give you that one. That one you earn.
— Sarah Zettel, Dust Girl
No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception.
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.
— Hugo Hamilton
run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...
— H.D., HERmione
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it’s all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat.
— Jeanette Winterson
At a certain point in his life he stopped searching for himself in everything that exists and gave in to temptations. Or, as you say, he sinned and later fled.
— Laura Esquivel, Malinche
Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts. ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68]
— Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds
Maybe such questions bothered me so much because they are being asked about me, all the time, within the echo chamber of my own fallen psyche and by unseen rebel angels all around. Are you really a son of the living God? Does your God really know you? Does this biblical story really belong to you? Are these really your brothers and sisters? Do you really belong here?…
— Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches
‎"I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples" ~ Elizabeth Catlett
— Melanie Anne Herzog
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
— Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden
The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.
— Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout
The gaze of others is quite without indulgence for our defects and that of Mantegna is pitiless. I am grateful to him. Harshness, in the realm of the arts, is a virtue, and it is sometimes a good thing to see oneself as one is. My stupor, however, comes from the fact that people recognise me where I myself seem to see a stranger. This leads one to meditate more deeply on the matter. Are they dwelling on my superficial appearance rather than on what I really am? Who can say?
— Marie Ferranti, The Princess of Mantua
Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.
— Dorothy Bryant
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.
— Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
We are all nameless inside.
— Marty Rubin
Your identity is not of your making
—  it is thrust on you from the day you are born.
We redheads are a minority, we tend to notice each other - you know, and notice our identity
— Julianne Moore
Last words of wisdom. Whoever you were as a child, she's your future.
— Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.
— Danzy Senna, New People
My mother once said, 'If you come across a man with more than one personality, you can be sure he's looking for himself in one of them, because he has no character.' But I think she was wrong
— Saud Alsanousi
Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.
— Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World
But what is identity really? What is it to ‘belong’ when we cast ourselves in the mold of a social group? I ask this, in spite of my implicit allegiance to one; yet, it is a worthwhile question. I mean, really, what does it even mean to share a commonality of blood or language or religion or heritage or context or economy or trade—and what value does this sharing of common traits, values and experiences truly have when there exists already a larger model of connection and commonality enveloping these disparate identities whole...? Do we pout at our inadequacies in the face of a “something” that is slightly more heterogeneous in its model of belonging? Sometimes, we simply must let go and chalk up all these movements to an inveterate (and arbitrary) sense of pride.
— Ashim Shanker
I think I’ll stay in pieces. I can shift them, rearrange, depending on the day, depending on what I need to be. I can change on a whim and be so many different girls and none of them has to be me.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
Be what you are not. The true self is no one.
— Marty Rubin
Any casual observer can tell at a glance I'm not the person I think I am.
— Marty Rubin
Identities were created for clarity and simplicity but it divides!
— Harrish Sairaman
You can believe that you are a good and caring person, but if you don't treat others with goodness and care, where is the proof?
— Nick Vujicic, Unstoppable: The Incredible Power of Faith in Action
A Jew ain't only a religion, and it ain't a race. It isn't an ethnicity, and you aren't disqualified if you're good at spreading mayonnaise on white bread or bad at money or good at sports or bad at guilt. It ain't about whether your mother is Jewish or your father converted or both parents fasted on Yom Kippur. It don't matter if you were bar or bat mitzvahed, or if your grandma's recipe for chicken soup kicked Campbell's ass, or any of that. It ain't about a toe in Israel, or an opinion on Palestine, or an uncle who died of a heart attack in Brooklyn or Queens, or a family story from Ellis Island, or an aunt who was murdered by nazis or Russian pogromchiks, or whether or not three-fifths of your person is scared shitless of Auggie's "schvartzes," or at least the young bucks you see walking with guns out and half their pants down.
— Alex Kudera, Auggie's Revenge
Because we are invited to be part of God's new creation now, we seek to embody the identity we have been given in Christ. . . . We engage in mission to establish friendships that lead to the formation of a new people in the world.
— Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda
Whatever we may be or seem to others, to ourselves we are always just ourselves
— Marty Rubin
One’s love for his country is a very sacred emotion that is intertwined with their sense of moral obligation and is an essential part of one’s identity.
— Aysha Taryam
When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.
— Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
When life hasn’t got a swing anymore, people may give in to obsessive oniomaniac compulsions, in as much as they are going out of their way to construct a flamboyant life style and change their identity from “don’t-need” to “must-have” consumers, so as to satisfy their gripping buying desire. ("Buying now. Dying later")
— Erik Pevernagie
I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.
— Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.
— Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces?
Yearn for the opposite, to buck the trend, to be different.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
No-one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my centre so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Be individual, break free from the flock to avoid the predictable midsummer haircut.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
Sometimes, I wonder .....Are we all as identical on our way out of the Earth...like the way we all came into it?If so, at what point do all our identities merge into a final whole?Are we all nameless and blank at point Infinity?
— Tina Sequeira, SOUL SOJOURN
Identity is one of those absurd synthetic terms that if you ask someone about it, they can’t give you a proper definition of it without recapping what they’ve learned in school. Identity supposedly is a state or a condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. At least, this is what dictionary.com explains to us. They always say that you need to define who you are and this definition is always labeled by gender role and preference, political views, religious beliefs, nationality, family bonds, age, jobs and education titles.” Lucera looked at the doctor and shrugged her shoulders. “This might be only MY perception.
— Neda Aria
A young homosexual friend recently said, "It's no secret that you, that one, has such-and-such color hair, is yea high, weighs thus and so, and so on, but when you keep one part of yourself secret, that becomes the most important part of you."And that is true, I think; it may be the most important truth of all.
— Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual
He cements his existence in an echo of time, but the journey demands him to change. He cannot see; his identity is a mask. Nothing in this world stays the same. The path unveils our identity. Our identity is not created but revealed.
— RJ Blizzard
The Bible says we are forgiven. It says we are saints. It says we are children of God, citizens of heaven, members of God's family, and chosen members of a royal priesthood. It says we are salt and light, we are people who dwell in a city set on a hill. It says we are co-heirs with Christ, ready to inherit the eternal life reserved for the saints. We cannot be separated from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.
— Mark Hall, Your Own Jesus: A God Insistent on Making It Personal
What we define ourselves us can sometimes bring forth the best images of ourselves--or vice versa, will create some of the worst restrictions we place on our lives.
— Andrew Kendall, The Dark Dictionary: A Guide to Help Eradicate Your Darkness, Restore Your Light, and Redefine Your Life.
It was all very isolating to think about, what people use to define themselves and their actions. And at the end of the day, did it make people feel better? Maybe it did. Maybe it gave them something to grasp at in the ambiguous vein of life on Earth.
— Rhian J. Martin, A Different Familiar
You hear me, don't ever let anyone kill the spark inside you. No matter what.
— Nicky Drayden, The Prey of Gods
Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
What kind of person am I?Am I even actually a person?I can never quite reach any kind of conclusion, sometimes I'm melancholic, sometimes I behave like a total fool, like a nut, and then suddenly I'm full of energy and threatening to explode. Just like now. My whole body is itching, it's awful.
— Ulli Lust, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life
Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all.
— Lyndsay Faye, Jane Steele
Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.
— Lodro Rinzler, The Buddha Walks into a Bar...: A Guide to Life for a New Generation
I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
A woman will always be insecure if she attaches her identity and sense of worth to the amount of male attention she gets.
— Anupama Garg
Just be yourself. You don't have to put on an act.""To be myself, I have to put on an act," Ginny said bitterly."What's that mean?""It means I don't know who I am.
— Philip Pullman, The Broken Bridge
Without somebody to watch me, laugh at my jokes, tell me what to do, ask me questions, race me to the river, make me guess the names of birds, or challenge me to count the silvery fish in a school, there was nothing for me to do. Without somebody to be somebody to, it was as though I wasn't somebody myself.
— Michael Dorris, Sees Behind Trees
They asked you the name of the god you worshipped and you replied, "Myself.
— Amber Sparks, The Desert Places
Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
Ego loves identity. Drag mocks identity. Ego hates drag.
— RuPaul
I don't want to lie about who I am, even if it doesn't matter. It's who I am. It's part of me.
— John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior
You are a gift to the entire planet earth
— Sunday Adelaja
I am the other.
— Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings
England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
— George Orwell, England Your England
There is this question of otherness….So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of danger, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘different’, and if, quite aside from opinions and convictions, they share similar natures at the deepest level.
— Sándor Márai, Embers
You can start looking for your purpose in life after you have identify who you are
— Sunday Adelaja
Until you have answered the question “Who am I” you will not be capable of living your own life
— Sunday Adelaja
The question “who am I” is the first question that every person should ask himself
— Sunday Adelaja
If you don’t know who you are, you will be someone else
— Sunday Adelaja
If we don’t know who we are, we conceal our true selves and wear the image of others
— Sunday Adelaja
If we don’t know who we are, we conceal our true selves and bear their brand
— Sunday Adelaja
If you don’t have your own identity, you will adopt the brand of another
— Sunday Adelaja
The value of human beings does not consist in their appearance
— Sunday Adelaja
Life isn't always about finding yourself. More often than not, it's about discovering who God created you to be.
— David A.R. White, Between Heaven and   Hollywood: Chasing Your God-Given Dream
What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.
— DaShanne Stokes
American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.
— Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
Who am I? What is my identity?I am a human being who doesn’t want to be identified as an Asian or as an American. I am not brown nor Desi. I want to be identified as a human being who is here to help helpless human beings no matter where they are from and what their race is. I don’t see color, I don’t see race. I only see human beings.
— Prabidh
Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being ‘a career woman’. This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticized her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does — sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she ‘really’ is. He has rejected her ‘real’ self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Every individual, however original he may be, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family and friends. Only thus is he truly himself. If in all this relativity he tries to be the absolute, then he becomes ridiculous.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
To know your purpose, you have to find yourself
— Sunday Adelaja
These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have.
— Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.
— J.M. Coetzee
It was the only act of rebellion I knew—to be worthy of such an insult as “butterfly.
— R.J. Hernández, An Innocent Fashion
There's a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself.
— Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
how lovers alter in the glance of each other, that space where their moods are accepted and their surrender is never taken advantage of.
— Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, The Last Song of Dusk
But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
She resented being told constantly that she was stupid, when she knew she wasn't.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.
— Rachel Cusk, Outline
She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.
— Rachel Cusk, Outline
Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.
— Rachel Cusk, Outline
I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.
— Rachel Cusk, Outline
That, of course, depends entirely on who you mean by 'they'. It's a very vague term. Who is or are 'they'? Is there such a thing, are there such persons as 'they'? We don't know. But I can tell you this. If the most popular explanation of 'they' is accepted, then these people work in very close, self-contained cells. They do that for their own security.~Jessop
— Agatha Christie, Destination Unknown
You know who you are. You have always been other.
— Brunonia Barry, The Fifth Petal
It is the lies he's telling her - as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life - that really break her heart. He's said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn't true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene's father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate
As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.
— Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World
I am what I am,It makes me I;﻿
— Sadashivan Nair
There was a closet somewhere inside me. Every day I went near that just to open the door and see all the masks of my face that I hid there.To select one which isn't me but still would look like me, which would hide me from the world in a better way. Day after day I stored so many masks in that closet that one day I searched for my real face in it and it wasn't there. I never understood whether I lost it or I forgot how it looked like, the more I searched the most lost I felt.
— Akshay Vasu
The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.
— Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude
Socrates: Yes mercy and grace are all linked with Love. Let your tears of gratitude wash away the dark dirt of ignorance obscuring your own dear Self which is Love.Charmides: So Love has nothing to do with lust then?Socrates: No! Lust is from the selfish false sense of a ‘me’ desperate for some pleasurable, momentary relief from its anguish and boredom. Love is refined, and her amorous advances are from the spirit, not the body.
— Alan Jacobs, Socrates Without Tears
It's my job to play this role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability, the same as any other actor. You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye. All the little things that make us human don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera. [on being a public figure]
— Adrián Lamo