Mitski Quotes

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

At some point, when I finished school in Zurich, I suddenly realised that I was nobody. I couldn't find a shape. Everything I was had been invented. Initially, I took it to be a fundamental conflict. But today I find pleasure in accepting that this thing called 'identity' is the true invention. There's no way that it really exists.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

You get to a certain age, and you feel like you know who you are, and how you fit into the world, and how the world sort of perceives you. And you get pretty set in that. And then things can happen that can turn it upside.

I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then.

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

What doesn't feel okay to me, what feels a little bit out of balance, is when you want to turn yourself into something else - when you want to be another person.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

I have struggled with identity all my life. It's not like something that just happened last week.

Without a musket to raise, a barricade to storm, a flag to wave, the question hit me in the face like the cold air: 'Who am I?'

I've never, ever labeled myself.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.

I don't even know what my voice is to this day.

I know for myself, and maybe I'm weird or whatever, but the whole thing is about constantly redefining identity.