Quotes about Identity

Languages are the pedigree of nations.

You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that... The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. That is all.

Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can one know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?

When death cuts all other links, there remains the name. Baptism: the union of a soul with a name, the name it will carry into eternity.

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led of Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.

Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.

So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers' laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

Follow your own nature.

I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.

I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

I wasn't scare, I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.