we become the stories we tell ourselves
Who you are moment to moment is just a story.
It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.
Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.
My image is the creation of media.
People are constantly trying to make an image for you. They'll dress you up and tell you to pose a certain way and take all these pictures... they want a certain image, so they create that. And unless you're spending a lot of time to create another image to counteract that image, theirs will win. So right now, I'm kind of dealing with a lot of false ideas of what I'm about.
The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.
Identity is an assemblage of constellations.
Every American was to become a performing self.
None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.
The ego knows itself by comparison.
Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.
How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?
The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities - powerful new tools like African fractals - and then just get out of the way.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
I think I'm always adopting a persona. That's how I look at pop music. I don't feel like I have to be myself. I feel like I have to be true to myself, but I don't have to show an exact picture of who I am.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.
Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.
Every single part of our persona, no matter how long we've rocked it, is a choice we make every day.
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
