Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

I always had this crisis: where do I come from? I was never an insider, never an outsider; I was always in the middle. But it means I never have borders in my head.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

I don't feel as if I belong to an age group.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

I was raised in Brussels as a Belgian but, at the same time, feeling that I wasn't necessarily from here.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere, which makes me belong everywhere.

When you've moved 13 times, you lose track of where you're from.

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?

My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.

I didn't have just one place where I could say, 'That's my home.'

I was realizing that I didn't have a home. I didn't really feel at home in one place.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.

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

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

Once upon a time . . . What time are we upon and where do I belong?

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

TRUTH: When a child believes he must win to be worthy, when young adults define themselves by what they do and not who they are, it is a kind of slavery a slave master would envy.

I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier.

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

I don't believe in a sense of home.

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life. ~ Bran

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.