#identity

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#identity #the-love-of-the-last-tycoon #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

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be. ↗

— John Powell

#love

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#identity #knowledge #business

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

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

I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn't tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian's and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn't wracked with anxiety when there aren't any boys around. And she doesn't need them to live, which is what it feels like for me. ↗

— Kerry Cohen

#co-dependence #identity #love #promiscuity #teenagers

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity ↗

— Amin Maalouf

#identity #racism #stereotype #stereotypes

I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#birth #identity #inspiration #inspirational #life