quotations about identity
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
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letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975
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.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
The buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. I'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow
This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists, viz. in participation of the same continued life by particles of matter successively united to the same organized body.
JOHN LOCKE
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
MAYA ANGELOU
Phenomenal Woman
Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Cry Wolf
What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.
NORMAN MAILER
Harlot's Ghost
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
ERIK ERIKSON
"The Problem of Ego Identity", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before.
AYN RAND
Anthem
I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote