#identity

"When I discover who I am, I’ll be free."

"First and foremost: a human being. If your definition of yourself is something else; maybe you should reconsider."

"We know what we are, but not what we may be."

"People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are."

"If you tell me I look like someone you know, I might get panicked and think you’re on to me. I thought nobody saw me abduct that guy and steal his identity."

"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."

"But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go."

"Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss."

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."

"Don't let others box you into their idea of what they think you should be. A confined identity is a miserable way to exist. Be you and live free. Trust that in living true to yourself, you will attract people that support and love you, just as you are."

"My name represents me, but it’s not who I am. It’s just a collection of letters. Unfortunately, none of them are love letters."

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

"The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary."

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

"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."

"My identity was a big issue when I was a teenager, and I had a lot of questions, like: 'Who am I?' 'Who do I belong to?' But when I was still quite young, I decided that belonging is a tough process in life, and I'd better say I belonged to myself and the world rather than belonging to one nationality or another."

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

"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."