quotations about identity
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
What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
MAYA ANGELOU
Phenomenal Woman
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
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
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
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
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow
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
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
ERIK ERIKSON
"The Problem of Ego Identity", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
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