Sociologists have a theory of the looking - glass self. You become what the most important person in your life {wife, father, boss, etc.} thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed...

Must you be in such haste to don your clothes, sir? I prefer you as you are. Abed, unclad, we are our truest selves, a man and a woman, lovers, one flesh, as close as two can be. Our clothes make us...

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia – forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion...

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

It still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions.

Sam's just dealing with some issues. He recently came to the realization that he's a twenty - year - old virgin prude.

On page 145, I defined belonging as the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the...

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a...

Boys are good at personas. There are a certain number that you can get at the drugstore, like costumes before Halloween. Being cool is pretending that you're not afraid of anything. But everybody is...

To be nobody - but - yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop...

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like coordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.

She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

Petra turned to her. Everybody lies about who they are. Name one person here who isn't doing that and I will drop out right now! Shanti felt that snake of truth coil around her legs, threatening to...

But that was another Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met.

You know, if you pretend not to be who you really are, you can end up with the wrong job, the wrong friends, God knows what else. Not your own life.

Not at all. It's why people come. They say it's about looking smart, or beautiful, or professional, but it's not. Gray-haired ladies try to recapture their former brunette. Brunettes want to go blond....

I don't want to be defined by this.

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I...