Quotes about Identity

How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships?...

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper.

How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed-up, become part of another.

You are you. That is what consoles me for the lack of many things.

Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself...

When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

She came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of culture.

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.

I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...

All mists curl off the roof of my being.

Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

What we do flows from who we are.