Quotes about Identity

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.

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

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.

If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.

In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.

We don't know much about our current selves, do we?

If you don't change your hairstyle because it's mostly fallen out and you don't shave, you've no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror.

Piggy was calling him a kid. Another voice told him not to be a fool; and the darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist's chair reality.

Acting like a crowd of kids/ the mask was a thin thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness/ He was safe from shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in return/ They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought"?Lord of the Flies?