#dent

I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#hispanic-american #identity #latina #latina-american #latino-american

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about how his own Paps, how he had beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time. ↗

— Justin Torres

#puerto-rico #spanish

I'm getting stale. I always do this time of year. I keep my nose to the grindestone and put in long hours and rustle up good meals and do all the chores and run errands and get along with people -- and have a fine time doing it and enjoy life. Then I realize, bang, that I'm tired and I don't want to wait on my family for a while and I wish I could go away somewhere and have people wait on me hand and foot, and dress up and go to restaurants and the theater and act like a woman of the world. I feel as if I'd been swallowed up whole by all these powerful DeVotos and I'd like to be me for a while with somebody who never heard the name. ↗

— Joan Reardon

#housewifery #identity #marriage #motherhood #family

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#self-knowledge #voice #self-knowledge

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses. ↗

— Janet Frame

#self-knowledge #self-knowledge

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”) ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#dissident #expatriate #lierature #writing #art

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside. ↗

— Rumi

#inner-life #inner-self #other #life

And we know that once we have a majority that are dependent upon the government, we will lose our freedom; it says we go into bondage. That's the next stage. ↗

— Sharron Angle

#dependent #freedom #go #government #into

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false. ↗

— Paul Graham

#rationality #religion #religion

a criminal sketch of Christ on a diner napkin -'Poet Prophets ↗

— Amber Koneval

#christian #god #identity #religion #religion