Luke Rhinehart Quotes

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

We'll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are.

In a way, you kind of get caught up in whatever image of yourself you think is out there.

My opinion about myself is so based on what other people think of me.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

I sometimes wonder if the inability to find oneself makes one seek oneself in other people, in characters.

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can't not be what everyone says I am. But I don't feel like an icon.

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

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.

That's an interesting way to put it: an expectation of who you should be. More often than not, it's described as an expectation of who you are.

I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience.

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

Whether at work, at home or in public, we have been trained to believe that who we are at the core of our being is often unacceptable. As a result, we work diligently to live up to - and sometimes down to - what others have made us out to be, whether or not it is an accurate reflection of who we are.

I have no issues with my identity.

Hair is about when you're younger. I am my hair.

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

I always had long hair. When you lose it, you realise just how important it is to your identity.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It's very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

My mama told me it's not what they call you - it's what you answer to.

Here I am, this smart, bookish girl, and I have this biker-chick name.