Quotes & Sayings About Identity In Night

Now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep. — Djuna Barnes

One of the villagers had left his home to try his luck abroad. After twenty five years, having made a fortune, he returned to his country with his wife and child. Meanwhile his mother and sister had been running a small hotel in the village where he was born. He decided to give them a surprise and, leaving his wife and child in another inn, he went to stay at his mother's place, booking a room under an assumed name. His mother and sister completely failed to recognize him. At dinner that evening he showed them a large sum of money he had on him, and in the course of the night they slaughtered him with a hammer. After taking the money they flung the body into the river. Next morning his wife came and, without thinking, betrayed the guest's identity. His mother hanged herself. His sister threw herself into a well. — Albert Camus

In the past I'd always felt like 'the girl' in the show or the movie. On 'Friday Night Lights' there were a bunch of girls, and I was the woman. Initially there was a little struggle with my identity around that. But now there's a sense of ease. — Connie Britton

By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting - a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had
had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist - even, perhaps, a murderer - could not take away from her. — Mary Balogh

Nothing worse than someone who goes to the dance, is excited to dance, dances all night, and then complains all the next day about his feet being sore. — Doug Cooper

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky. — John Berger

If
If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie,
Life would be delight,
But things couldn't go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn't be I.
If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I'd be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn't be you.
If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,
Yet they'd all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn't be we. — E. E. Cummings

But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features. — Marcel Proust

I once saw a show about an amputee who lost his leg and still feels it. He actually wakes up at night to scratch his leg as if it's still there, attached to him. They call it a phantom limb.
I would be like that. A phantom draki, tormented with the memory of what I once was. — Sophie Jordan

There are so few other things we can look at with pride,' said Allen. 'We don't have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. There is nothing to replace it. It's an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it's almost like you strip the identity of the people. — H. G. Bissinger

Death is for a long time. Those of shallow thought say that it is forever. There is, at least, a long night of it. There is the forgetfulness and the loss of identity. The spirit, even as the body, is unstrung and burst and scattered. One goes down to death, and it leaves a mark on one forever. — R.A. Lafferty

The child who attends school does not remember the abuse that happens at home or via the family; those memories are held in another part of the child's mind. The child does not even remember abuse that happened the preceding night. — Alison Miller

Do I as a Christian understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny? I am a child of God, God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Saviour is my brother; every Christian is my brother too. Say it over and over again to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask God that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true. For this is the Christians secret of the Christian life, of a God-honouring life. — J.I. Packer

One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.

On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.

Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once. — M.J. Kaufman

Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem56 is actually a reductio hominis. "The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of the transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God. — Mark C. Taylor

Heavy hearts, heavy eyelids," said the master of the caravan.
"Huh?" Heather looked up in dismay, shocked to find she'd nearly been left behind as the caravan prepared to move on. Her last night's sleep had been fitful, full of dreams where Khalid made her suffer for running away. Now she felt drained and groggy, unable to get the images of Khalid spanking her over his knee and then ravishing her out of her tired head.
"Look," the caravan master said. "Riders approaching, a great armed party. No doubt they are searching for escaped slaves."
"No doubt." Heather straightened up wearily in the saddle, determined to outwit Khalid and conceal her true identity as a runaway. The one thing she was sure of was that capture would bring a fate worse than death. Already she could imagine Khalid tying her up, spanking her bottom, making her howl for mercy until she had no pride or will to resist. And then would come the true test of her virtue ... — Patricia Grasso

You'll find more emotions of words in those crumpled & rolled papers thrown in the dustbin than the edited script you jolted down last night in your folder. More splashes of paints lay scattered around your drawing paint-plate, the brushes equally messed up with their romance with the colours before the actual finishing of a fine portrait. Your draft box breathes more words than the real, grammatically -groomed post on your blog. The room smells more of the combined samples of vividly used tropical, musky, floral essences mixed in different ratios to get the exotic cologne at the end.
Gist is spending that extra cent to obtain a perfect blend. That extra counts to the journey of a masterpiece which later finds itself an identity of an extra-ordinary creation.
You're that 'extra' to me who glorifies my existence and makes me feel like a clone-sister of masterpiece or rather a mistress-piece!!!

- Shonali Dey (Shon Alley) — Shonali Dey

Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder's slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven's theme song. The night light on life's dark wall, late at night. Heaven's recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it's true. — David Foster Wallace

Should we talk about work?" ... Cali took a sip of her drink. "Let's skip work. I'll be up to my ears in it for the next few months. This is the last night of calm before I lose my life and my identity to the job completely." "Ah, you're a spy then," he offered with a nod and a devastating grin. "Me, too. — Mira Lyn Kelly

THIS PAST, THE NEGRO'S PAST, OF ROPE, FIRE, TORTURE ... DEATH AND HUMILIATION; FEAR BY DAY AND NIGHT, FEAR AS DEEP AS THE MARROW OF THE BONE ... THIS PAST, THIS ENDLESS STRUGGLE TO ACHIEVE AND CONFIRM A HUMAN IDENTITY ... YET CONTAINS, FOR ALL ITS HORROR, SOMETHING VERY BEAUTIFUL ... . PEOPLE WHO CANNOT SUFFER CAN NEVER GROW UP, CAN NEVER DISCOVER WHO THEY ARE ... . - James Baldwin — 50 Cent

By day I am nothing, by night I am I. — Fernando Pessoa

Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night. — Richard Price

The hell with your secrets," shouted Bonnie.
"Language, language! How about this: One of you has kept a secret all
their life, and is doing so even now. One of you is a murderer - and I am
not speaking of a vampire, or a mercy killing, or anything like that. And
then there is the question of the true identity of Sage - good luck on your
research there!One of you has already had their memory erased - and I don't mean
Damon or Stefan. And what about the secret, stolen kiss? And then there is
the question of what happened the night of the motel, that it seems that nobody
but Elena can recall. You might ask her sometime about her theories about
Camelot. — L.J.Smith

You are the stories and incidents that you never tell to anyone. You are the thoughts that you get while standing under the
shower. You are those memories that won't lets you sleep at night peacefully. You are those words that you will never say while
speaking with someone. You are those scars that you always hide from everyone. You are those little secrets that you will never let the world know. You are everything that you hide under the identity that you call the real you. — Akshay Vasu

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. — Camille Paglia

She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died. — Elizabeth Taylor

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them. — Milan Kundera

With that said, don't be trifling about being a feminist. It really infuriates me when high-profile people in your position self-identity as feminists just because it's trendy at the moment and then don't do any of the, you know, actual work of trying to make things equal for everybody. You're going to have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty in order to create a society that takes women as seriously as the men. The type that encourages us to not define ourselves by who we go to bed with at night, but by who and what we see reflected back at us in the mirror in the morning. The type that recognizes that women are not a monolith and that they have wildly different experiences informed by their race and/or sexuality. Be that beacon of light that we can look toward. Be the feminist who will help normalize the idea of Feminism for society. Be the feminist everyone needs. No presh. 3C. — Phoebe Robinson

Has it ever occurred to you- have you never, somewhere along the line, received vibrations to the effect- that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night? No war was ever fought for so many different reasons meeting in one reason clear as crystal. They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity. — Harper Lee

PART 2
I felt doomed to death,
But in a flash,
Before I could reduce my thoughts
To an emotion,
I felt a mass leave my body:
Departing.
Then my mind becomes anonymous
As is each night.
Just unfinished thoughts,
and a deep sickness inside,
As I was forced to swallow it,
Something I've tried to bury deep inside my
psyche to this day.
(poem written by alter personality) — Alice Jamieson

My twenties were great. Who didn't have fun in their twenties? But my attention was more out there, more about the surface stuff and the cosmetic stuff. I was always thinking, 'What do I need to do?' Now in my thirties, it's, 'What do I want to do?' I've just become more solid with my own identity. So whoever wants to say their twenties are better ... Yes, they're fun, especially at night - better parties, better cocktails ... not better sex though. Absolutely not. And whoever says that is lying because sex in your thirties and beyond is f**king out of this world. — Zoe Saldana

That night I followed him whenever he let me. I had to. Followed him into strange, complicated actions, very far, bad and good actions. But I was never allowed into his world. What was I to him? A fantasy. I gave him another identity. Whenever I lay next to him in a bed and it was night, I was too excited to fall asleep, too unwilling to lose a chance that I might be allowed to enter his life. Since he wanted fantasy, what I wanted didn't matter. I asked myself if there was any chance he would change. No. Change for him was fantastical. Yet I was, and still am, a victim of his charity. — Kathy Acker

We are more than the person who wakes each day. We are the dreams of the previous night and the nightmares of the week before. — Shaun Hick

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night. — John O'Donohue