Quest for Identity Quotes

A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land.

A lot of blues music seems like it's moving away from God, or the center, and Gospel music is moving towards it. It's embracing a higher reality. When you look a little closer, the way that I define it or explain it, is that the blues is the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God. People are searching for union with God. They're searching to be home. There's something in people that seeks this union with their creator. Why am I here? Where am I going? What's it all about? Who am I? All this kind of stuff.

All writers - all beings - are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

The purpose of life is to find out 'Who am I?', 'Why am I here?' and 'Where am I going?'

Pursued by our origins... we all are.

I look for a thematic idea running through my movies and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it.

There are recurring elements in popularized fairy tales, such as absent parents, some sort of struggle, a transformation, and a marriage. If you look at a range of stories, you find many stories about marriage, sexual initiation, abandonment. The plots often revolve around what to me seem to be elemental fears and desires.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.