Quotes on Identity

Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.

Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of.

You are not 'in the now;' you are the now. That is your essential identity-the only thing that never changes. Life is always now. Now is consciousness. And consciousness is who you are. That's the equation.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder.

Ego loves identity. Drag mocks identity. Ego hates drag

My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman.

My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.

At its heart, the quest that trans people are on is to have the same thing that straight — and gay — people have: the ability to wake up in the morning and be ourselves, without permission, without apology. Our lives should not be defined by wigs, or surgery, or which bathroom we use. Our lives should be defined by our identities, and the truth we bear in our hearts.

Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

Renunciation mind has nothing to do with sacrificing. When we talk about renunciation, somwhow we get all scared because we think that we have to give up some goodies, somehing valuable, some important things. But there is nothing that is important; there is nothing that is solidly exisiting. All that you are give up is actually a vague identity . You realize thigs is not true; it's noe the ultimate. This how and why to develop renunciation

Cinema is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presuppose some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. God's love for you and his choice of you constitute your worth. Accept that, and let it become the most important thing in your life.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks