Tim O'Brien Quotes

When you don't inherit an identity you have to define it on your own.

Everything that I embody is the fluidity of my own consumption.

I want everyone who's listening to know who I am and not just see me as this singer. I want them to feel connected to my story.

I've never met anyone that I feel is like me or looks like me. There's just one of Beanie Feldstein.

Kim Tan is me! And I am Kim Tan.

I think there's always a conflict within me about being comfortable and secure and then being an individual and fighting for what I want to be on an individual basis.

Ask most people, and they will say their name or profession, but you have to know who you are both physically and mentally. It's really important in football because then you know your trigger points, how to adapt and improve.

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

The overall concept of 'Only You' is a reflection on the illusion of love, how we confront, understand and manifest our self identities within relationships.

I was always so big, it took me a long time to grow into my body.

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

In a field, I am the absence of field. In a crowd, I am the absence of crowd. In a dream, I am the absence of dream. But I don't want to live as an absence. I move to keep things whole. Because sometimes I feel drunk on positivity. Sometimes I feel amazement at the tangle of words and lives, and I want to be a part of that tangle.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

The ego is like too many dark clouds around the sun - the sun gets lost

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

Who are you, Master?' he asked. 'Eh, what?' said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. 'Don't you know my name yet? That's the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it.

Confidence has brought them out into the light, but they seem to have forgotten - light's no good for creatures of the night.

You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

You will always be a monster - there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become is entirely up to you.