#identity

In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me. ↗

— Tony Burgess

#memory #change

I felt like a character in a science fiction story, trapped in someone else's body, articulating someone else's words. To be frank, I bored even myself. And by the time I was thirty-six, my course was set, my die stamped, I knew I would never change. ↗

— Philip Palmer

#change

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever? ↗

— Jean Thompson

#destiny #heart #humanity #identity #learning

For a long time, we assume we know who we are, until the moment we fully realize who that is; in that moment, identity is no longer predictable, but rather takes the form of a truth that, like any other, can become a sentence with no more than a change of perspective. ↗

— Sergio Chejfec

#change

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

— Núria Añó

#feminism #freedom #gender #gender-inequality #hypocrisy

I'm not the same person I was before, and I am deathly afraid I will never be her again... ↗

— Jodi LaPalm

#identity #novella #romance #still-life #death

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of? ↗

— Kiran Desai

#fathers #identity #loss #death

I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#identity #wisdom #equality

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#illusion #unknown #world #experience

Jerry-5486: "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that's why they broke down—just couldn't stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this. ↗

— Philip G. Zimbardo

#prison #self-reliance #stanford-prison-experiment #experience