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Identity Quotes

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why shou...

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And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousnes...

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Picture of Ernest Becker
Ernest BeckerThe Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, b...

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Picture of Erving Goffman
Erving GoffmanStigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit mor...

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...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privil...

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If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existe...

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Picture of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn WaughBrideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way...

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I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to o...

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By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

Picture of Fernando Pessoa
Fernando PessoaThe Book of Disquiet

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynam...

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The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this...

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Picture of Fernando Pessoa
Fernando PessoaThe Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

The police can't protect consumers. People need to be more aware and educated about identity theft. ...

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It's amazing how much information we share in social media, then we wonder why people steal our iden...

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We should be very concerned: if identity theft is so simple to do, what's to stop me from entering t...

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No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly...

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Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children kn...

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To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I wil...

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Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be tra...

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Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the ...

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There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all...

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She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a centur...

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He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on...

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Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.

Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But ...

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Mirror mirror on the wall, show the real me or naught at all.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped ...

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Picture of Gene Wolfe
Gene WolfeThe Shadow of the Torturer

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world becaus...

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You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, ther...

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Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–ho...

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I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; f...

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England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, l...

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Picture of George Orwell
George OrwellEngland Your England

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never b...

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Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish....

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At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember y...

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Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpret...

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We’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppre...

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Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity,...

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Picture of Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Gloria E. AnzaldúaBorderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon th...

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Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s posses...

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He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide

Picture of H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. LovecraftThe Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Originality must compound with inheritance.

Picture of Harold Bloom
Harold BloomThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

Picture of Harold Bloom
Harold BloomThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remai...

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Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition ...

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Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, it's like which is me an...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiDance Dance Dance

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, bu...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a s...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a s...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited ...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

No two human beings are alike; it's a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive syst...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Sk...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiUnderground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main way...

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I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almsho...

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I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and conveni...

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But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some ve...

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Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of l...

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I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; yo...

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In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous...

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She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say...

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I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciat...

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I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton-...

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Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of tho...

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It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not e...

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We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of ...

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Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through ...

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I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversi...

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Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and...

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But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out ...

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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betr...

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I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not ...

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Picture of Joan Didion
Joan DidionSouth and West: From a Notebook

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get somethin...

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The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.

Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages...

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Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been...

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Picture of John Barth
John BarthLost in the Funhouse

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of he...

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Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation kno...

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She breathes all the political gases that flow around this, but she never seems to inhale them.

What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don’t e...

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Jesus, why would he hook up with Becca?" "Well, she's not known for her personality or generosity of...

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We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

J
John PowellBooks By John Powell: Unconditional Love/Why Am I Afraid To Tell You Who I Am/The Secret Of Staying In Love/Fully Human

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

J
John PowellBooks By John Powell: Unconditional Love/Why Am I Afraid To Tell You Who I Am/The Secret Of Staying In Love/Fully Human

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a u...

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A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was him...

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He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that ...

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It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw hims...

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A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been t...

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You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance ...

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