It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
If I lost control of the business I'd lose myself--or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.
Rainer Maria Rilke said, "I live my life in widening rings." It may well be useful to note the expanding of the circles in which we live, but it is also important not to lose the sensation of cycles, which may be painful to anyone living in a culture dedicated to the extending line. Maybe in life we never really develop, but only expand the rotations that give us our firm identity. Maybe we should expect always to get into familiar trouble and to repeat both the glorious and the defeating themes that are embedded in our soul.
Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the things I want to live for. Between those two answers you can determine the identity of any person.
It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America.
I had a lot on my mind trying to put together some kind of plan for my wayward self. The future seemed made of matchsticks, fragile as a house of cards. Where would I go now? Who would I be? Would I be me or somebody else?
I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?
I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong. I opened my eyes slowly, as sensitive to light as a roll of film: just expose me and I’d vanish.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
It's not important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules!
Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve: not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually.
The best way to be spectacular is to be yourself.
We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight
There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume
and smell of the pot.
She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.
Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
We have to formulate what we want, and be so concentrated on it, and so focused on it, and have so much of our awareness on it, that we lose track of ourselves. We lose track of time. We lose track of our identity. And the moment we become so involved in that experience, that we will lose track of ourselves, we lose track of time, that picture is the only picture that is real, and everybody's had that experience when they've made up their mind that they've wanted something. That's Quantum Physics. That's Manifesting Reality. That's The Observer To The Full Effect.
No one can master the past; one can only interrogate it.
Every organization brands its particular culture and identity with its own distinctive stamp.
Love is not what we become but who we already are
There is an authentic spiritual impulse at the heart of our branding economy. We use brands to do identity work for us, finally, out of our desire to be recognised by others, by a power greater than ourselves; and the desire to recognise and know others, to commune with others under a power greater than ourselves. And in this recognising and being recognised, we experience that great power that draws us inward and outward.
There is an authentic spiritual impulse at the heart of our branding economy. We use brands to do identity work for us, finally, out of our desire to be recognised by others, by a power greater than ourselves; and the desire to recognise and know others, to commune with others under a power greater than ourselves. And in this recognising and being recognised, we experience that great power that draws us inward and outward.
If S.B. sometimes railed against Western customs, treating democracy as if it was a euphemism for bad faith, red tape, and diplomatic evasiveness, this was not because he put himself above the lway, ready to waive constitutional procedures, or ignore the views of others. It simply reflected his impatience with indecisiveness, and his aristocratic heritage. It was his pride in this heritage that led him, as an eleven year old boy to stand up to Mr. Vincent's disparaging conflation of Kuranko and savages. To be Kuranko was, as his father had told him, the only conceivable way of being a man. But when S. B. invoked Kuranko-ness, it was not some form of tribalism that he had in mind, but the values he held dear-- not only forthrightness, stoicism, hard work, and self-reliance, but also honesty, generosit, and fidelity to one's principles. Pertinently, it was S. B. many years ago, who provided me with a not implausible etymology for the word Kuranko. "It iwas from the kure tree," he said, "whose wood is very hard."Thus, to say kure n'ko is to imply that the speaker is tough-minded, able to withstand all kinds of hardships, and persevere, like the kure tree.
LIke any other animal, human beings will fight to the death when threatened or cornered, but as a species we are perhaps alone in imagining that our survival depends on such elusive properties as recognition, love, identity, honor, prestige, and wealth. Only we will feel that our very existence is endangered when our name is taken in vain, our pride is hurt, our nation threatned, our reputation impugned, our voice ignored, our loyalty betrayed. No other animal will figh t tooth and nail, not only to see that such symbolic losses are made good, but that those hwo have allegedly taken these things fro us are themselves subject to all the torment, degradation, and loss that we have suffered at their hands. This is why violators seldom admit to guilt. For they believe they were fully justified in their excesses; they were only taking back what was rightfully theirs, preserving their civilization, defending their rights, upholding their honor, and, of course, obeying orders from above.
"Who am I?" is not really a question because it has no answer to it; it is unanswerable. It is a device, not a question.
"I've changed my music from time to time so I'm hoping that I can completely change my life from time to time, too. Like live in another land, in another place, and just get completely soaked up in another way of being. Could be in this country or another country, somewhere were you can be reborn a number of times not just creatively, but personally as well. I guess I want to go through life as more than one person."-- David Byrne
“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”
