identity quotes

Bodyand soul,Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

-June Jordan
  'Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person', in the Evergreen Review, Oct.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

- (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan
  'Canada:  A Borderline Case', CBC radio broadcast, 29 May.

Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity.

- HenryJohnTemple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
  Letter to Henry Bulwer,1 Sep.

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

- Henry Roth
  'The Eternal Plebeian and Other Matters', in Shifting Landscape.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of a deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

- Robert Louis Stevenson
Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.