Iain Sinclair Quotes

I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain. I can't hear the echo of my footsteps, or can't remember the sound of my own name.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I think there is a moment in every parent's life where we realize that we have lost ourselves a little bit. It's a moment of looking in the mirror and going, 'I need to put on some lipstick.'

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.

Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You don't lose what you never had.

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.

When did I stop being me?

I don't know if you know who you are, until you lose who you are.

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

Everything must belong somewhere. I know that now, that's why I'm staying here.

Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.

My name, I have spent my whole life trying to make that name mean something. And now it's gone.

I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore.

I used to be somebody. Now I’m somebody else.

I was unrecognizable to myself; I saw my reflection in a window; I didn't know my own face.

Sometimes I try to lose my identity, and I can't get rid of it!

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

My first book was about grappling with my identity and transitioning medically and socially as a young person. At that point, it hadn't been told yet. There wasn't a trans memoir that was written from the perspective of a young person that transitioned.

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.