Quotes about Identity

I made my Facebook name "Benefits," so when you add me now it says "you're friends with benefits."

Your age doesn't define your maturity; your grades don't define your ability; and what people say about you doesn't define who you are.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

The sense of being alone is a huge issue for so many people in this world. As a worshipper of Jesus, there's a very real sense that we are always seen, held and known.

I get a friend to travel with me... I need somebody to bring me back to who I am. It's hard to be alone.

O]ne can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.

And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.

The only time Tol's clothes looked good was before he put them on.

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.