Quotes about Identity
Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.
— Wendell Berry
My Mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation.
— Wendell Berry
But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.
— Wendell Berry
I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be.
— Wendell Berry
My mother is a fish.
— William Faulkner
I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.
— William Faulkner
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
— William Faulkner
Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
— William Faulkner
Your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do.
— William Faulkner
He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad.
— William Faulkner
when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire
— William Faulkner
It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.
— William Faulkner