Quotes about Identity

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

They convinced me meaning they had dragged her 4'10 Black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don't want to.

The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. And that is hard enough.

In my journals I have a lot of conversations that I'm having with you in my head. I'll be having a conversation with you and I'll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of Black woman/white woman where it's beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we're two voices.

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.

It's because...you see, if we had souls, which we haven't, and if our souls met--yours and mine--they'd fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they'd see that they had the same root.

Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.

Be ugly, be God