Identity Quotes - Page 28

• I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

  P. L. Travers

  Teacher, Children, Book

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• Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that’s a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.

  William P. Young

  Thinking, Who We Are, Produce

  Interview with C.J. Darlington, Miriam Parker, Deena Peterson, Melissa J. Carswell, www.titletrakk.com.

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• Personal change, growth, development, identity formation--these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events--a job, a mate, a child--through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Jobs, Children, Pain

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• The troubles of the 20th century are not unlike those of adolescence -- rapid growth beyond the ability of organizations to manage, uncontrollable emotion, and a desperate search for identity. Out of adolescence, however, comes maturity in which physical growth with all its attendant difficulties comes to an end, but in which growth continues in knowledge, in spirit, in community, and in love; it is to this that we look forward as a human race. This goal, once seen with our eyes, will draw our faltering feet toward it.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Eye, Maturity, Feet

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• The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Thinking, Self, Light

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1990). “Three Faces of Power”, p.259, SAGE

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• The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Country, Personal Identity

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• Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity.

  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

  Real, Abuse, Half

  1839 Letter to Henry Bulwer,1 Sep.

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• Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice. ... Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, ... or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Morning, Men, Essence

  Richard M. Weaver (1966). “Life Without Prejudice: And Other Essays”

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• Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Change, Law, Secret

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.40, Courier Corporation

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• The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Land, Roots, White

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• Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women.

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

  Struggle, Motherhood, Choices

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1978). “Worlds apart: relationships between families and schools”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• Adolescent girls were fighting a mother's interference because they wanted her to acknowledge their independence. Whatever resentment they had was not towards a mother's excessive concern, or even excessive control, but towards her inability to see, and appreciate, their maturing identity.

  Terri E Apter

  Girl, Mother, Fighting

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• The adolescent does not develop her identity and individuality by moving outside her family. She is not triggered by some magic unconscious dynamic whereby she rejects her family in favour of her peers or of a larger society.... She continues to develop in relation to her parents. Her mother continues to have more influence over her than either her father or her friends.

  Terri E Apter

  Mother, Father, Moving

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• Parenting can be established as a time-share job, but mothers are less good "switching off" their parent identity and turning to something else. Many women envy the father's ability to set clear boundaries between home and work, between being an on-duty and an off-duty parent.... Women work very hard to maintain a closeness to their child. Father's value intimacy with a child, but often do not know how to work to maintain it.

  Terri E Apter

  Mother, Jobs, Children

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• One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity--not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification ofthe range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.

  Terri E Apter

  Self, Goal, Decision

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• This is why Indians are thought to be stupid. They can't think, they don't know anything, they say. But we have hidden our identity because we needed to resist, we wanted to protect what governments have wanted to take away from us.

  Rigoberta Menchu

  Stupid, Thinking, Government

  Rigoberta Menchú (2009). “I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian woman in Guatemala”, Verso Books

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• Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Mother, Trying, Size

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• I was so excited to be able to say that I was a lesbian that I would shake hands with strangers on the street and say, 'Hi! I'm Sally Gearhart and I'm a lesbian.' Once, appearing on a panel program, I began, 'I'm Sally Lesbian and I'm a gearhart!' I realized then that I had put too much of my identity into being lesbian.

  Sally Miller Gearhart

  Hands, Able, Too Much

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• The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity with nature. We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Lying, Spring, Moving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II”, p.410

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• The writer's ultimate purpose is to use his gifts to develop man's awareness of himself so that he, man, can become a better instrument for living together with other men. This sense of identity is the root by which all honest creative effort is fed.

  Jay Saunders Redding

  Men, Roots, Effort

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• Watch us, all stand in line, for a slice of the devil's pie. Who am I to justify, all the evil in our eye. Been through hell. All them fools whose souls' for sale. Demons screaming in my ear. Your soul's me, your soul's somethin' that I, feel inside. If I run, Lord only knows how far. You're part of my identity. I sometimes have the tendency to look at you religiously.

  D'Angelo

  Running, Eye, Evil

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• Unbelievers can tolerate Christ only as long as He is stripped of His real identity.

  R. C. Sproul

  Real, Long, Christ

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• The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

  Alan Watts

  Rejection, Ego, Sitting

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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• I think of each movie as a puzzle. The fun is in solving the puzzle: finding a musical identity for the picture, however that can be summed up.

  Marco Beltrami

  Fun, Thinking, Musical

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• You could say that this book is ripped from the headlines, but that wouldn't be fair. Bret Anthony Johnston's riveting novel picks up where the tabloids leave off, and takes us places even the best journalism can't go. Remember Me Like This is a wise, moving, and troubling novel about family and identity, and a clear-eyed inventory of loss and redemption.

  Tom Perrotta

  Wise, Book, Moving

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