#identity

Looking for who I am is who I am. ↗

— Tom Spanbauer

#love

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self. ↗

— Jerzy Kosiński

#identity #isolation #love #lovers #relationships

We are all children of a God who knows us, loves us, and is there for us, especially in our sorrow and suffering. To be separated from Him is to be lost. ↗

— Toni Sorenson

#love

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. ... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#gender #gender-identity #marriage

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#god #identity #love #art

Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars. (p. 65) ↗

— Hilary Thayer Hamann

#girls #hamann #identity #masks #sexuality

I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#culture #identity #prejudice #art

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#identity #individuality #read

He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#division #identity #unity #unity

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#identity #individual #nation #art