quotations about identity
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that -- how to express this -- you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.
MARY MCCARTHY
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The Paris Review, winter-spring 1962
Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
Every fellow is really two men -- what he is and what he might be; and you're never absolutely sure which you're going to bury till he's dead.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
You are what you are, not what others would have you be.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.
GENEEN ROTH
Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment
The endless story that we construct to make sense of our lives must inevitably include the author as actor, object, observer, and setting, and there is only so much coherence you can expect from a story like that.
CARL BEREITER
Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet.
DAVID RICHO
interview, The Urban Muse
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me.
JAY LONDON
Business Law Today
There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
No Country for Old Men
The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Sex ... or lack thereof ... is at the center of everyone's identity, and once you've cracked someone's desires, you understand them in full.
ARIANNE COHEN
Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
MARGARET DRABBLE
A Summer Bird-Cage