Judith Rossner Quotes

After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.

I have this identity for myself as a writer and the only thing that can happen is that I chip away from it.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

I feel like Black Thought is a name that has so much meaning and depth, not only to me but to my fans, that it's something that I wanted to hold onto a little bit tighter.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

Some ego is involved because I guess one wants to be perceived as a good clown and one puts one's name on the art; but it's so hard to do anything in life, trapped as we are in our bodies, that is purely selfless for others... somehow the self is always involved.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

I wore Nietzsche's eyes. Now that I step back to see, I haven't been me.

Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

I was raised in a household where I read Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Kant, and I was never taught that my mind was feminine. I'm aware that my body is.

You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is like. But this very, very important quality of subjectivity, this quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, "I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me." That me-ness, M-E-hyphen, that is what really constitutes consciousness.

You know what the hardest thing is? What nobody wants to understand -- is me. People want their memories of me to be my memories of me. But you know what? They're not.

If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?

This is my life, I think. I am an accumulation of objects.