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
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
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
You are what you are, not what others would have you be.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
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
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
I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me.
JAY LONDON
Business Law Today
It is not a slight thing, gentlemen, to force a man to say what he is, or what he believes himself to be; for that supreme word of man, that single expression which he utters of and upon himself is decisive. It lays down the basis upon which all judgment of him is to be formed. From that moment all the acts of his life must correspond to the answer given by him.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Jesus Christ: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris
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
I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
MAYA ANGELOU
Phenomenal Woman
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
The buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. I'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
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
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975
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
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
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
There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.
MARY OLIVER
"The Journey", Dream Work