We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.
Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.
An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.
When I was a child, the FA Cup was one of the crown jewels of the sporting year, along with the Grand National, Wimbledon and The Open. But with every announcement it seems to lose another piece of its identity. First it was sponsors added to the name, followed by the semi-finals at Wembley.
My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.
Cultural relativism has made it so people don't know who they are anymore.
The anonymity of the internet has been completely abandoned - everything's so tied to your identity and sense of self now. It's hard for me to see that changing, but that's why I wrote a love letter to something that once was.
I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.
You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.
She is well practiced in the art of losing herself.
When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment - if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes - everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
I find myself only by losing myself.
It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.
I am a marked person, and no one who's unmarked is going to understand that. It's very intimidating. I don't even know what my place is anymore. What's my role in society? Who am I, after everybody has branded me?
With the issue of immigration, it's very difficult because, although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears.
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
I was not I, I was nothing - and that seemed to me quite marvelous.
When a grown man reaches forty, we change him for an old one. He has completely disappeared. There's only the most superficial resemblance between the two of them. Nothing is handed on from one to the other.
For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.
