Search for Identity Quotes

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis's quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing immortal simply to ask, What is the meaning of what we are?

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Catcher in the Rye had a profound impact on me-the idea that we all have lots of dreams that are slowly being chipped away as we grow up.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

We had some wonderful people raising us, but they still weren't our parents. As you get older, it gets distorted and convoluted, complicated, and, of course, you start looking for attention, affection, affinity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

I'm sure one reason I became an actor is my basic unwillingness to live one life.

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.

That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Hmm... at some point when I was making 'Postcards,' it struck me, what the underlying themes for the record would be. It would be about choices, fears and doubts, and it had an existentialist theme to it.

I've suffered from an identity crisis my entire life. It's why I went into acting.

Maybe I am looking for the reason why I exist.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

I think that Sappho expresses the orphaned part of ourselves. The orphaned part of ourselves that reaches out to passion for completion. That reaches out to motherhood for completion.

Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.

You know, a lot of people give up their religion, but, oh, my goodness, they go through such agonies. I never did.