quotations about identity
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
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 you are physically ... male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
Identical strictly means "one and the same;" and if it were tied down to its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we have said already, that no such thing as personal identity is possible.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"Personal Identity", Essays on Life, Art and Science
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
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
We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.
CHARLES DE LINT
Happily Ever After
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
MAYA ANGELOU
Phenomenal Woman
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
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that's a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
interview, Title Trakk: Your Christian Book
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
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
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
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow