#entity

Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are. ↗

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#love

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#identity #knowledge #business

There was a way in which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#self #truth #business

To the degree that we embrace the truth that our identity is not rooted in our success, power, or popularity, but in God's infinite love, to that degree can we let go of our need to judge. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#love

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#empowerment #flaws #freedom #gender #ideal-woman

But there was a special kind of gift that came with embracing the chaos, even if I cursed most of the way. I'm convinced that, when everything is wiped blank, it's life 's way of forcing you to become acquainted with and aware of who you are now, who you can become. What is the fulfillment of your soul? ↗

— Jennifer DeLucy

#crisis #encouragement #hard-times #identity #inspirational

Just as sometimes I wondered if Grandpa had ever existed, sometimes I wondered if I truly existed myself. As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself: a skinny girl with the flapping shorts and too- big a T-shirt, always watching the other girls at school, a girl in a pink bedroom sitting with a book propped on her knees, the words she was reading entering her mind, some sticking like gluey never to be forgotten, others disappearing instantly, I could remember everything and remember nothing. I would watch a movie and recall every scene as if I had written the script, then watch another movie another day and be unable to recall it at all. ↗

— Alice Jamieson

#amnesia #dissociation #dissociative #dissociative-identity-disorder #memory

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity ↗

— Amin Maalouf

#identity #racism #stereotype #stereotypes

I didn’t even have a name for her, shade or human, but I didn’t need one to know her. (Eric) ↗

— Shannon A. Thompson

#fiction #identity #love #lovers #naming

He was the first to recognise me, and to love what he saw. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#inspirational