Quotes about Identity

It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.

Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....

The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

I don't think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They've seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like.

The name's Obama. Where do I belong?

I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.

The thing about getting old, Bar," Toot had told me, "is that you're the same person inside." I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. "You're trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it's still you. You understand?

For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.