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 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
I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me.
JAY LONDON
Business Law Today
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
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
The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
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 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
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
Be careful who you pretend to be. You might forget who you are.
ANONYMOUS
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
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
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
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
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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