Idendity Quotes

“My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,” I would invariably be told that they or their brother or cousin had been there after the war, and asked what I was doing up here, so far from home, when I could be on the beach with a pretty little hula girl. I never had an answer to these questions, but they didn’t expect one—it was all they knew to ask, but no one wanted to hear what I had to say.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“I think Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had to limit him to English themes, and if they had told him as an Englishman, he had no right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose theme is Scottish. The Argentine cult of local colour is a recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign.

Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local colour; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local colour.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings