It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that...

That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

whisper about, the one who finds out years later, just by accident, that she is not herself at all.

can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

You're sort of like the Paris Hilton of wine, Martin had offered. She'd nearly keeled over in horror.

People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan.

It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept...

You cannot say to the sun, or to the rain, To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little...

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and...

You do know, right, that between the no-longer and the still-to-come you are being continually tattooed, inked with the skulls of everyone you've ever loved—the you & the you & the you & the...

... a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

Perhaps the picture that had their own family was too mixed with their hopes and fears so that they could ever see you as the person you were.

It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!"I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then,if I like being that person, I'll come up: if...

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can...

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century, Oliver said. Who isn't?

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,...

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture {place, language and history}, the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic...

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home...

For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. But here," he said, so softly I could barely hear him, "here in the dark, with you… I have no name.

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The...

I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and...

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence {even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction}. Laura's...

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's...

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.

Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they...