Italo Calvino Quotes

Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

If you're getting your guidance about who you are and what to do with your life only from the external world, then by definition you'll be led away from your authentic truth. Your authentic truth isn't in the material world. It's counterintuitive, but you have more power in the world when you know you're not of it.

We are blind to the worlds within us, waiting to be born.

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

You do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world - your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?

There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.

The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.

The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Ledisi means to come here, to bring forth. It’s a Nigerian word and it’s from the Yorubu culture, I believe, and my parents named me, my dad and my mom, and really my dad, and I had no choice in that. That’s my real name and that’s what it means.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

I decided I was gonna call myself cause Gucci Mane cause that was my father's name. His nickname was Gucci Mane. That's what my grandmother called my father. People would call me Gucci Mane every now and then, but honestly, that was his name.

The place you have to start to be any good at this, at acting, is with yourself. Everything is inside of you, all of it - the murderer, the great mother, the therapist, the husband. Everything is inside of us.

There's something in everyone only they know.

I've always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.

Externally we are a single being, but internally we are a world.

Be who you are, not who the world wants you to be.

All my life I've felt like somebody's wife, or somebody's mother or somebody's daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that's why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself.