2,417 Quotes About Identity

Imagine not thinking again. Consciousness will completely end one day and you won’t even be able to check. You won’t have you, but for the moment, you are here. For a limited time, you can feel things and think. You get a glimpse of the universe, to participate in a nanosecond of its infinite life span. Everyone will be mashed potatoes, so why not be a few different things before then?

Take me back into the time when I lost track of time!

Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.

But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become prisoner of the effect I had on them. [...] I was shackled not so much to my good looks, as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be.

Was it possible for a king to run so far from his identity that he ceased to be anyone special? Because I had never felt lower, or less worthy of my title.

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Why wait to forgive and let go only after you have sufficiently wallowed in your despair? Why not forgive and let go now?

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.