“Your habits reflect your identity, so if you struggle to change a particular habit, re-think your identity.”
Gretchen Rubin
more infosource: pre-publication notes for her forthcoming book Better Than Before; more info here
category: growth, habit, identity, routine
medium: author website
“Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.”
Ameni Rozsa
more infosource: “An Average Sadness,” in I Thought My Father Was God (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 379.
category: breakup, fortune, identity, loss, love, self
medium: Essay
“Be what you are, bury what you are not,” he had said. “Ticket stubs are trickery. Saving things is a magic trick, with mirrors.”
Ray Bradbury
more infosource: Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 87.
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category: collect, ephemera, identity, self
medium: Fiction
“The more I reveal myself, the harder my job becomes. And so that’s always the challenge: how to preserve myself and how to retain mystique so that people can suspend disbelief when I choose odd terrain.”
Vera Farmiga
more infosource: “For Vera Farmiga, A Search Leads To ‘Higher Ground,'” All Things Considered, NPR, August 26, 2011.
category: acting, filmmaking, identity, job, mystique, work
medium: Interview
“Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the nom de plume, and rarely talked about, is its power to unlock creativity—and its capacity to withhold it. Even when its initial adoption is utilitarian, a pen name can assume a life of its own. Many writers have been surprised by the intimate and even disorienting relationships they have formed with their alter egos.”
Carmela Ciuraru
more infosource: “The Rise and Fall of Pseudonyms,” The New York Times, June 24, 2011.
category: ego, identity, nom de plume, pseudonym, self
medium: Newspaper essay
“Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”
David Brooks
more infosource: “It’s Not About You,” The New York Times, May 30, 2011.
medium: Op-Ed
“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”
Lorrie Moore
more infosource: A Gate at the Stairs (New York: Random House, 2009), 211.
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category: identity, love, movie
medium: Fiction
via: paperbackgirl“He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.”
Jonathan Franzen
more infosource: The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 539.
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category: identity, lost, want
medium: Fiction
“Cities have lived lives, too, and when you walk them, you begin to see exactly who they have become.”
Richard Goodman
more infosource: “Surrendering to Provence,” in A New York Memoir (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 45.
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category: city, identity, life
medium: memoir
“I wish you knew me before I was like this.”
Gil Scott-Heron
more infosource: “New York is Killing Me,” by Alex Wilkinson, The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 26–32.
category: addiction, drugs, identity
medium: magazine profile
“I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.”
Christine O’Donnell
more infosource: campaign ad for Delaware’s U.S. Senate special election, to be held on November 2, 2010
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category: advertisement, campaign, identity, politics, senate, witch
medium: campaign ad
“I want my place! my own place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
more infosource: “The Intelligence Office,” in Mosses from an Old Manse Vol 2 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1882), 365.
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category: calling, identity, job, place, purpose, work
medium: fiction
“The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.”
Gil Scott-Heron
more infosource: “New York is Killing Me,” by Alex Wilkinson, The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 26–32.
category: expression, identity, mirror, musician, self
medium: magazine profile
“It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.”
Jeffrey Rosen
more infosource: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” The New York Times, July 19, 2010.
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category: identity, Internet, memory, past, reputation, shame, technology
medium: newspaper article
“It’s our choices, Harry, that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
J. K. Rowling
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identity