Quotes & Sayings About Our Identities

Like Batman, all of us hide behind our masks and use them to help define ourselves for others. We all have secret identities of a sort, hidden behind our smiling social-networking profiles or our happy church faces. They're not lies, really. They're just not the whole truth, because we know that most of the people we encounter day-to-day couldn't handle the truth (or perhaps we couldn't handle giving it to them). — Paul Asay

The Jewish people are very diverse, and I believe this rich tapestry of identities and experiences strengthens our community. — Lynn Schusterman

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist ... he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love ... poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point. — Truman Capote

In the U.S., we are free to speak our minds and to spend money without being forced to reveal our identities - except when using the Web. Browsing the Web leaves digital tracks everywhere in the form of log files, and anyone who hosts a Web site can be easily traced. — Jamais Cascio

We all watch and are constantly being watched in the social media. And while we feel this gaze of others, we form our own identities, our own personas, having as a guiding principle the opinion, the values, the (gossiping) interests of others. — Nicos Hadjicostis

As for major obstacles keeping young Latinos from becoming filmmakers, I think our communities are still coming into their identities as storytellers. It's such an important identity to reclaim - it's how our ancestors kept our cultures alive. But a long history of silencing, invisibility, and marginalization has kept generations of Latinos from believing in themselves, from seeing themselves as agents of their own lives. I think there needs to be a focus on this aspect to help cultivate young Latinas to see themselves as cultural producers and defenders. — Aurora Guerrero

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are. — Spike Lee

There is a particular view, still popular among left-wing intellectuals in the West, that the Soviet system was "socialism gone wrong." This thought expresses precisely the major political danger of our times, which is the belief that politics involves a choice of systems, as a means to an end, so that one system may "go wrong" while another "goes right." The truth is that socialism is wrong, precisely because it believes that it can go right - precisely because it sees politics asa means to an end. Politics is a manner of social existence, whose bedrock is the given obligations from which our social identities are formed. Politics is a form of association which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is founded on legitimacy, and legitimacy resides in our sense that we are made by our inheritance. — Roger Scruton

Sin comes from not realizing God's love. Sin comes from thinking ourselves only as sinners, while overcoming sin comes from thinking ourselves as overcomers. We act our our perceived identities. — Peter Kreeft

At my Grand Gala Ball of Coming Out, everyone will be required to wear a white dress, or else tuxedo tails and nothing else. A kiddie pool of sweet tea will be the dance floor as we wrestle with our complex identities because we all, every one of us, are complex, slippery, and tasty. We'll dance to bad eighties music as we lick and suck the excesses of multiple oppressions off one another. We'll all come out for what we are, and see ourselves in one another's body glitter. — Scott Turner Schofield

The recognition that modern societies are no longer monolithic, that the
imaginary social space has mushroomed into a multitude of identities has
propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality,
transculturalism and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan
citizenship can become a reality. However we still remain circumscribed by
our Little Italies, our China Towns etc., which beyond the pleasures of
experiencing culinary delights, nevertheless create a self illusion that we
have attained a level of cultural awareness of the other. — Donald Cuccioletta

Sometimes, I wonder .....

Are we all as identical on our way out of the Earth...like the way we all came into it?

If so, at what point do all our identities merge into a final whole?

Are we all nameless and blank at point Infinity? — Tina Sequeira

But what is character? How solid? We cut our hair, we shave our beards, we lose a limb. We remain ourselves. In dreams, however, we swap identities licentiously. We sabotage the structures of our character without a thought. — Gregory Maguire

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. — Andrew Solomon

We lose peace of mind when we indulge in the materialistic things. We see our reflections in these possessions and properties and attach ourselves to the point of becoming saddened by them. These possessions gradually become our identity and these identities start disturbing us with time. — Ryan Foret

What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine.
By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you. — Andre Gorz

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. — John Perry Barlow

To embody a new paradigm of civilization - to learn to think like a planet in order to heal and nurture a planet - is not a typical hero's task. It is more the task of a gardener. The planet does not offer us challenges to be overcome to prove our worth or individuality; it presents us with a community to understand, a community with disparate needs and identities that are nonetheless intertwined in mutual dependencies. — David Spangler

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever. — Alain De Botton

The history of the bagel suggests that Americans' shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be "New York," and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development - and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture.

It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It high- lights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities - for foods and eaters alike. — Donna Gabaccia

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. — Joyce Appleby

If cissexual academics truly believe that transsexual and intersex people can add new perspectives to existing dialogues about gender, then they should stop reinterpreting our experiences and instead support transsexual and intersex intellectual endeavors and works of art. Instead of exploiting our experiences to further their own careers, they should insist that their universities make a point of hiring transsexual and intersex faculty, and that their publishers put out books by gender-variant writers. And they should finally acknowledge the fact that they have no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes. — Julia Serano

At the foundation of the Christian life, there is a kind of sacred individuality, a sort of holy aloneness that cries out to be left alone with God. This isn't all of the Christian life. It doesn't erase those parts of a Christian's experience that happen in the context of relationships, but this sacred solitude needs to be discovered, respected, and protected.
It is that place where we most irrefutably hear God tell us that he loves us, and we come to know that, no matter what other people may say about us or do to us, God will not abandon us. That holy solitude is the place where we find God's Spirit changing our affections and redirecting our identities. It is, for Jesus-followers, holy ground. — Michael Spencer

This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences. — Finn Mackay

There remains a problem with race in America because of the church's failure to understand the issues from a biblical perspective."

"Rather than being called into a different community by Scripture, we see our broken communities as justified by Scripture."

"Rather than challenge the worldly status quo, religious groups perpetuate stereotypes, sectarianism, and schisms when accepting ethnic denominational identities- inverting Pentecost by reading in multiple languages unrecognized by listeners and offering separate worship services according to musical preference."

"Ultimately, our aim is to draw attention to the biblical narrative from which comes to the strength for the long road of reconciliation. — Joy Moore

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities. — Jason Mraz

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?
-Richard — Douglas Coupland

Identity is a concept of our age that should be used very carefully. All types of identities, ethnic, national, religious, sexual or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world. — Murathan Mungan

I think the ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world. — Mohamed ElBaradei

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities. — Frank Delaney

So long as we insist upon defining our identities only in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts against them, we will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied, and exhausted ... . The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a byproduct of our love for them. It keeps us from straying too far from them, for too long. Their cry should be more compelling than the call from the office. — Danielle Crittenden

The Yale professor Dan Kahan has done much research showing that our judgments about risks - Does gun control make us safer or put us in danger? - are driven less by a careful weighing of evidence than by our identities, which is why people's views on gun control often correlate with their views on climate change, even though the two issues have no logical connection to each other. Psycho-logic trumps logic. And when Kahan asks people who feel strongly that gun control increases risk, or diminishes it, to imagine conclusive evidence that shows they are wrong, and then asks if they would change their position if that evidence were handed to them, they typically say no. That belief block is holding up a lot of others. Take it out and you risk chaos, so many people refuse to even imagine it. — Philip E. Tetlock

I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth. — Yo-Yo Ma

The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity. — John Trudell

Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are. — Parker J. Palmer

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders. — Giles Foden

We wear different masks and hide our reality from everyone, including ourselves. Our assumed identities becomes our whole lives, and we start to believe them - even more than others do. — Mo Gawdat

Without this faculty of man and beast alike to recognize identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions, and to preserve the framework of a stable world, art could not exist. When we open our eyes under water we recognize objects, shapes, and colors although through an unfamiliar medium. When we first see pictures we see them in an unfamiliar medium. This is more than a mere pun. The two capacities are interrelated. Every time we meet with an unfamiliar type of transposition, there is a brief moment of shock and a period of adjustment-but it is an adjustment for which the mechanism exists in us. — E.H. Gombrich

We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations. — Alain De Botton

The advantage of having an unexpected opportunity to successfully grieve our early-life losses; to enjoy healthy relationships; to develop an unshakable sense of self-esteem; to find our unique purposes in life; to have peace about our adoption experiences; to find our true identities ... now I am alive ... fully alive and on the cutting edge of my life's journey. What better place could one be? — Sherrie Eldridge

If we are to succeed, we must maintain our anonymity, mask our identities. Even if it means suffering the mockery of others. Being taken for fools, fops, nitwits, even cowards. — Emmuska Orczy

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of 'sins' to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved. — Anton Szandor LaVey

Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us
by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth. — John Welwood

I think that everyone should have at least a part of them that's self-invented; in fact, the world would be much more interesting if we all created our own identities afresh whenever we felt like it. Otherwise you're just walking around regurgitating what's expected, which is like, why bother? — Jody Gehrman

When we really start to take a look at who we think we are ... we start to see that while we may have various thoughts, beliefs, and identities, they do not individually or collectively tell us who we are. [And yet] it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history. — Adyashanti

I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families
our ancestors
are our identities. Biology is destiny.
I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either. — Aimee Friedman

Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred - for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology. — Barack Obama

It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. — Sharon Salzberg

Online, we still can't reliably establish one another's identities or trust one another to transact and exchange money without validation from a third party like a bank or a government. These same intermediaries collect our data and invade our privacy for commercial gain and national security. Even with — Don Tapscott

By the end of the meeting, one conscientious human being had cleared up the confusion generated by web-crawling data-gathering programs. The housing authority knew which Catherine Taylor it was dealing with. The question we're left with is this: How many Wanda Taylors are out there clearing up false identities and other errors in our data? The answer: not nearly enough. Humans in the data economy are outliers and throwbacks. — Cathy O'Neil

Sometimes our identities get distorted because people lie about us and scare us, and sometimes our identities get distorted because of things we've actually done. The result is the same, though. Isolation. — Donald Miller

The narrative that each person tells herself and others is a big part of how we construct our self-identities. It's one of the most important ways that we make sense of our past and present and understand our hopes for the future. — Peg O'Connor

Facebook has woven itself into the fabric of our lives and the foundation of the Internet. I think everything will be redefined because people are using their real identities on the Internet. — Ruchi Sanghvi

All of the agreed-upon pariahs throughout pop-culture history put their identities into the thing we decry. And yet we derive our own identities from the act of hating. We connect on the things we are disappointed in. Some may argue that nothing in history gathers a crowd like complaining about Lady Gaga's meat dress. — Patrick Stump

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought. — Frank Plumpton Ramsey

The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities. — David Whyte

It all goes back to the spiritual malnutrition we talked about in the introduction. Specifically, it's about trying to use food to fill not only the physical void of our stomachs but also the spiritual void of our souls. Here's the problem with that: Food can fill our stomachs but never our souls. Possessions can fill our houses but never our hearts. Sex can fill our nights but never our hunger for love. Children can fill our days but never our identities. — Lysa TerKeurst

Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us. — A.J. Orde

When we lose someone we love, suddenly nothing fits anymore. Who we thought we were is now a jumbled mess of memories and hopes we once had, for a future that now looks completely different. When we lose someone close to us we are forced to reevaluate our entire identities. We must figure out who we are now that this person is gone, and the experience can be overwhelming. — Claire Bidwell Smith

The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo Sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching. Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe intervenes, so goes the story, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo Sapiens by completely different beings who posses not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds. This is something most Sapiens find extremely disconcerting. We like to believe that in the future people just like us will travel from planet to planet in fast spaceships. We don't like to contemplate the possibility that in the future, beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own. — Yuval Noah Harari

The mind needs stories as much as the body needs food. There are junk stories and more nourishing ones. The food we eat becomes our bodies, assimilated stories form our identities — David Loy

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. — Alain De Botton

Our people represent a tapestry of interwoven identities embodying the rich diversity of what it means to be Jewish. — Lynn Schusterman

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the 'leaders' must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities. — Maya Angelou

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert. — Dean Koontz

We stand poised on the brink of becoming true cyborgs, of having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies, features that modify our abilities, desires, personalities and identities. — Yuval Noah Harari

At its heart, the quest that trans people are on is to have the same thing that straight - and gay - people have: the ability to wake up in the morning and be ourselves, without permission, without apology. Our lives should not be defined by wigs, or surgery, or which bathroom we use. Our lives should be defined by our identities, and the truth we bear in our hearts. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. — Thomas Pynchon

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations. — Bryant McGill

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents. — Maggie O'Farrell

Every day that we exist on this planet the forces of white men in power are aimed at policing women's bodies and subjugating our identities to make us feel lesser than, to control us through physical and economic annihilation. — Gabby Rivera

In opening we can see how many times we have mistaken small identities and fearful beliefs for our true nature and how limiting this is. We can touch with great compassion the pain from the contracted identities that we and others have created in the world. — Jack Kornfield

Food can fill our stomachs but never our souls.
Posessions can fill our houses but never our hearts.
Sex can fill our nights but never our hunger for love.
Children can fill our days but never our identities.
Jesus wants us to know only He can fill us and truly satisfy us. — Lysa TerKeurst

Boundaries, rulers, and names of nations can change, but the Earth is always our home and our source of life. Earth is the only indelible identity we can have. This is why I am suggesting that we expand our identities beyond the limits of nationality and culture to encompass the only identity that is definite and real by identifying ourselves, first and foremost, as Earth Citizens. — Ilchi Lee

The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies. — Tom Robbins

And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identities as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of 'groanings too deep for words'. — Russell D. Moore

Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind - the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Does poetry - or language or philosophy or music or architecture, even that of our temples - really need to dance to the same tune as our political befiefs or our religious convictions? Is the strict harmony of our cultural identities a virtue to be valued above others that may come from the accommodation of contradictions? — Maria Rosa Menocal

I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive. — David Papineau

Sexual and reproductive health and rights are universal human rights!They are an indivisible part of the broader human rights and development equation. Their particular power resides in the fact that they deal with the most intimate aspects of our identities as individuals and enable human dignity, which is dependent on control of our bodies, desires and aspirations. — Babatunde Osotimehin

Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents. — Joyce Carol Oates

I'm very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up. — Catherine Opie

WE ALREADY HAVE everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves - the heavy-duty fearing that we're bad and hoping that we're good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds - never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake. — Pema Chodron

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography. — Erica Jong

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities
a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. — Hannah Arendt

Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us. — Leslie Weisman

One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities. — Mark Zuckerberg

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect. — Kate Zambreno

I don't fit into any demographic, I never really have. But that's true of lots of us, especially people my age and younger who've grown up with complicated identities, because life has gotten more complicated, and in which we don't want to be defined by any single one of them, but are happy to present many facets of our interests and personalities. — Andrew Sullivan

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world. — Bell Hooks

Our personal identities are socially situated. We are where we live, eat, work, and make love. [ ... ]
Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us. The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior. — Philip G. Zimbardo

Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner. — Nick Land

I firmly believe that we are all given signs and dreams and put in situations that define who we were and who we are to become. All of it points towards our destiny. All we need to do is listen carefully to the messages and follow our dreams. It is in our dreams that we find our true identities and where our destiny awaits. — Isaiah Washington

I'm autistic and most of my children are autistic as well. Please don't tell me how sorry you are for me. I don't need pity. I'm just a mother who has children. Our unique identities and neurology make us who we are. We are perfectly fine just like this, thanks — Tina J. Richardson

We must tie our identities to our unchanging, unflinching, unyielding, undeniably good, and unquestionably loving God. — Lysa TerKeurst

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. — Franklin A. Thomas

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home. — Barbara Hurd

Adoption would become a priority in our churches if our churches themselves saw our brotherhood and sisterhood in the church itself rather than in our fleshly identities. — Russell D. Moore

We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, the more we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision. — Gregory A. Boyd