#identity

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing? ↗

— Charles Yu

#hearts #identity #lies #mirrors #sense

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people. ↗

— Anne Rice

#life #family

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary. ↗

— Kunal Sen

#suicidal #teenager #love

The moment I laid eyes on her I knew she was somebody else, somebody I could love. And since somebody else never showed up, I did fall in love with her. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#love #mistaken-identity #love

It’s scary telling someone you care about, someone you love who you really are. ↗

— Eric Jerome Dickey

#love #scary #love

She was returning home to be the wife of, mother of, First Lady of, but what did that really mean? ↗

— Stacy Hawkins Adams

#fictional-character #identity-crisis #personal-growth #home

There was a way in which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#self #truth #business

The door wasn’t closing. Shiloh’s spirit opened up as she considered the possibilities. ↗

— Stacy Hawkins Adams

#fiction #identity #personal-growth #women-s-fiction #faith

To the degree that we embrace the truth that our identity is not rooted in our success, power, or popularity, but in God's infinite love, to that degree can we let go of our need to judge. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#love

Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#creator #guidance #identity #inner-self #knowledge