Identity Conflict Quotes

You can't be who you are going to be and who you used to be at the same time.

Abedi appears to be one of the many thousands of Western Muslims who have embraced militant Islam, often as a way of trying to resolve the tension between their split identities.

I think it would be tough for a lot of the athletes that I play with to think that while that I'm showering, that I'm performing on the field, I'm bleeding, I'm fighting with a person that is a homosexual.

I love my heritage. I'm very proud of being Cuban. But I clearly understand that I am an American first.

I'm dark-skinned. When I'm around black people, I'm made to feel 'other' because I'm dark-skinned. I've had to wrestle with that, with people going, 'You're too black.' Then I come to America, and they say, 'You're not black enough.'

There's this whole split personality thing of being a farm girl and a rock and roll girl.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

No matter how American I become, I'm considered part of the Chinese community by my own family.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a computer programmer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.

At every point I wished that I was born English. They need to make it colder in here. You could hang meat in this room. But, yeah...I grew up in a very English household. My folks were from Liverpool. I've said this before, but there is nothing more English than an Englishman that no longer lives in England.

I have one identity, and that's Israeli and Jewish. I don't view myself as an American citizen.

When I was at seminary in my early twenties, one of my teachers said to me, "You're going to have to decide. Either you're going to be an academic or you're going to be a pastor. You can't be both." I remember thinking, Rats! I want to be both! Why are you telling me I can't do these two things?And so I have kind of oscillated to and always wanted to do both.

I'm like two different people. The way I sing comes from the music I listened to when I was younger, from black American R&B singers. My speaking voice is something else. It's what my mum and dad taught me.

In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.

Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.

What after all am I. Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white in America.

I don't really want the kind of Englishness that I have represented.

I don't think there is a distinct change, because in the West I'm not a person who can serve his purpose.

As far as the industries go, in the North, they think I'm a South Indian actress; down South, I've always been thought of as a Bombay girl. I guess it's sort of an identity crisis, even though I'd like to belong to all the industries.

I have no interest in Israeli citizenship... Israel does not want me, nor do I want Israel.

It's very hard to talk about Palestine to Jewish people - they see me as a betrayer.