The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?
Just after my mother died, I grabbed hold of my Divergence like it was a hand outstretched to save me. I needed that word to tell me who I was when everything else was coming apart around me. But now I'm wondering if I need it anymore, if we ever really need these words, "Dauntless," "Erudite," "Divergent," "Allegiant," or if we can just be friends or lovers or siblings, defined instead by the choices we make and the love and loyalty that binds us.
In her dream each of the people assembled around her looked like several others, whom she recognized, only they weren't gradually transformed from one into the other but each of them seemed to be inside the others simultaneously and one of them shone through another. And something else was inside them as well, something unexplainable which wasn't within any of them, whose sum total they appeared to be, and this was what fascinated her above all.
Sich mit diesem oder jenem zu identifizieren, ist also ein normaler Vorgang. Gefährlich wird es, sobald eine einzige Identität bestimmend wird, sobald man nur noch Muslim ist oder Christ oder Deutscher, Iraner oder meinetwegen Anhänger eines bestimmten Fußballclubs oder eines Popstars. Dann wird aus der pragmatischen Einschränkung, die jede Art von Identifizierung bedeutet, eine reale Verstümmelung der Persönlichkeit.
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 like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.
It occurs to me to devise mental tests on myself to see if I am who I think I am, but then I think, “I am who I think I am, or I probably am, and a test I conceive and answer about myself isn’t a way to test if I’m another person pretending to be me, because no matter how I answer I’ll answer like myself, thus falsely proving to myself that I am who I think I am.” No, what I need is for my clone to create and administer the test.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.
Everyone has a unique problem of their own, an issue that follows them throughout life and never goes away. You discover it early and go on to struggle with it for the rest of your life, almost until it eventually becomes an old enemy that you lose the will to fight or hate anymore. And just as every person has their own void, their own haunt or their own unanswered question...they also have the power to turn it into a legacy every bit as profound as they make it.
Oh come on, smile. Lisa, Jack... being bisexual is hardly a crime. Best of both worlds, isn't it?'And Ianto pushed her away. 'No,Gwen. No, really it's bloody not. It's the worst of any world because you don't really belong anywhere, because you are never sure of yourself ot those around you. You can't trust in anyone, their motives or their intentions. And because of that, you have, in a world that likes its shiny labels, no true identity.
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.
The gaze of others is quite without indulgence for our defects and that of Mantegna is pitiless. I am grateful to him. Harshness, in the realm of the arts, is a virtue, and it is sometimes a good thing to see oneself as one is. My stupor, however, comes from the fact that people recognise me where I myself seem to see a stranger. This leads one to meditate more deeply on the matter. Are they dwelling on my superficial appearance rather than on what I really am? Who can say?
Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.
