Rita Levi-Montalcini Quotes

I'm not stuck in anybody's body. I'm me.

My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

I feel like so much more than my gender and so much more than my relationship to my body and my relationship to men. And, but suddenly you're sort of asked to be an expert.

My body and my will are one.

Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno.

I am not the we of anyone

You don't get to Define me, only I can Define me, all I wish from you is to recognize my Definition.

An 'I' without a body is a possibility. But a body without an 'I' is utterly impossible.

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person. We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.

I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people, women, that they can't control their bodies.

I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing.

Who gets to decide what you want?

I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.

I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.

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.

As if one could do what one wanted with one's own body!

Of all the thoughts that rise in the mind, the thought 'I' is the first thought.

I view my own body as a petting zoo. I am the main attraction... And the only customer.

Body and soul. Two different things

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

...that I alone hold the definition of what I am.

A purpose you impart is no longer your own.

Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?

The body, then, has a mind of its own. It must follow, then, that the Mind has a body of its own, even if it’s like nothing that we can see around us, or have ever seen.