Bruce Feiler Quotes

Religion and culture are two important ways in which we as humans find our identity. That's certainly true for me.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.

I love feeling like I have purpose and maybe that's the purpose I'm giving myself.

I was just very into things that were the opposite of what other people liked. I didn't want to listen to music that I could find at a friend's house. My identity was really forged around that, and you know, eventually that kind of identity gets dismantled and fed to the vultures. But I was somehow on my own mission.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.

After looking at Salomaybe, I don't know who the hell the real me is. I think it's closest now to the real me because for one thing, I'm used to this.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don't think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody's struggle. No matter what it is.

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.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?

I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am.

I'm not religious, and I feel that has to do with me being uprooted so many times in my life that I've explored many religions and sentiments from many different families basically across the globe.

Meg, when people don't know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

In order for you to be yourself, you have to be somebody first.

It's not easy to know who you are and it's very painful and takes a lot of time and that is why a lot of people don't want to put in the effort.

I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine