Identity Search Quotes

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

You're full of insecurities in your 20s - most of the time your heart's being broken, you're having a difficult time finding out who the hell you are, and I was trying to do that in the full glare of the public.

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

Once I know who I'm not, then I'll know who I am.

I definitely, when I was younger, struggled a little to understand my identity and who I wanted to be.

I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself.

You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind.

That's a lovely starting point for me as an actor: the question of what will we - or can we - do with this lot of years with which we're blessed? More than my other films, 'The Danish Girl' is about the gigantic risks involved in being true to one's self.

How many more idols must you find before you realize that you are the one you have been searching for?

As I grow older, I have a growing curiosity about my other half. My dad did a wonderful job raising me, and I wouldn't change it for the world, but at the same time there is a growing curiosity about my other half.

I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.

I think, a lot of my career and my life before I went to Sweden, I felt like I was trying to be someone else.

I have done a lot of work internally to find out who I am, what voice Eamonn Walker has and how he wants to put it out there.

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity.

I went through different looks. At one period, I was preppy because that's how I grew up. But then I had bleached hair in the front. And I used to wear - then I wanted to be a beatnik. It was hard to be a beatnik in suburban Baltimore. But I wanted to be one.

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 was always kind of searching for the right social group in high school and never really felt like I belonged with any one specific clique.

I was a maverick. I went to five different colleges looking for I don't know quite what.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

It's called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' but it's really not about crazy rich Asians. It's about Rachel Chu finding her identity and finding her self-worth through this journey back into her culture. Which, for me as a filmmaker, exploring my cultural identity is the scariest thing.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.

I know for myself, and maybe I'm weird or whatever, but the whole thing is about constantly redefining identity.

There's something safe about playing a character, but then it's like, 'Who am I underneath it all?'