Quotes about Identity

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you *do* that makes you who you are.

I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.

That means you're my kid, I explained, and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.

Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

And then while we all still waited I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you're giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

He thinks people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn't that, it's nothing.

I needed no snake to tell me I didn't belong in that family or house, or life. I was the tree of knowledge.