“For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self.”
Henri Nouwen
“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”
Kevin Arnold
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”
Don Delillo
“If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”
Chuck Palahniuk
“Committing yourself is a way of finding out who you are. A man finds his identity by identifying. A man's identity is not best thought of as the way in which he is separated from his fellows but the way in which he is united with them.”
Robert Terwilliger
“Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man's life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self.”
B. R. Ambedkar
“[Feminism] asks that women be free to define themselves -- instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.”
Susan Faludi
Bookmark
