Quotes about Identity

For most of history, anonymous was a woman.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, This is what I have made of it! This! And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

For," the outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. [...] He was not in love of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.