Identity Quotes - Page 8

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

All pain in life comes from suppressing your true identity.

When you know who you are, you know what to do.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others - but none in themselves nobler than others.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing-I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

the man eventually becomes what he dreams of"
By T. Afsin Ilgar - Ted`s Tale

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.