"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We know what we are, but not what we may be."
— William Shakespeare

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."
— David Sedaris (Holidays on Ice)

"When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are. "
— Laurie Anderson

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
— Harvey Fierstein

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are...Or we can decide for ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"...I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last."
— Khaled Hosseini

"It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself."
— Betty Friedan

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Today I married myself and I became my own wife."
— Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde

"One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. "
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose."
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches)

"If you understood everything I said, you’d be me"
— Miles Davis

"If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"Time is the enemy of identity"
— Michael Moorcock

"The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices"
— Amin Maalouf (In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong)

"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..."
— W.E.B. DuBois (Souls of Black Folk & Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933-1945 & Movements of the New Left 1950-1975)

"Be not another, if you can be yourself. "
— Paracelsus

"Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."
— Jean Baudrillard

"This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products"
— Larry McCaffrey

"They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
— W.E.B. DuBois (The Souls of Black Folk)

"To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.

If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)

"Dreams are manifestations of identities."
— Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates)

"At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)