IDENTITY QUOTES II
quotations about identity
Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.
WILLIAM JAMES
Principles of Psychology
This monologue of the self is a maze of words out of which I shall not find a way until someone else gives me a lead. I roll my eyeballs, I pucker my lips, I stretch my ears, but the face in the mirror is my face and will go on being mine even if I hold it in the fire till it drips. No matter with what frenzy I live the business of death or wallow in blood and soapsuds, no matter what wolfhounds I hurl into the night, my acts, played out within the macabre theatre of myself, remain mere behaviour. I offend no one, for there is no one to offend.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas -- and you have to work through it all.
V. S. NAIPAUL
New York Times, Apr. 24, 1994
As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
Nobody knew how to be what they were right.
JOHN BARTH
Lost in the Funhouse
Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.
JOHN LAHR
The New Yorker, 2007
I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Invisible Monsters
I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
You cannot hide your true self forever.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Fallen Angels
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
interview, Oct. 25, 1982
It strikes me that self, not just my self, but all self, the phenomenon of self, is perhaps one field, one consciousness -- perhaps there is only one "I", perhaps our brains, our selves, our entire identity is little more than a label on a waveband. We are only us when we are here.
ALAN MOORE
Alan Moore: Conversations
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Envy: An Assay"
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Blindness
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Tinker
The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it.... The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
JAMES BALDWIN
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961