Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.
The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality. -Claude Frollo
While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.
In fact, the teenager's concept of "square" (f the term is still in use), when they talk about their parents, is almost identical to the concept of "cultural deprivation" as it is used by educational bureaucrats. In both cases it reflects an extremel...
When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican, half-black. Another one was from Colombia. Another one was born in the U.S., but his mom was from Ge...
Have you ever wanted to be somebody else? Today I fantasized about being my own identical monozygotic twin. How cool would that be? I could both be me, and yet be someone completely different.
Even corpses had purpose, or could be given one. A man could make himself an island his entire life, only to have reason itself laid about him, a fabricated existence. Identity became relative, history nonexistent. As they said, dead men told no tale...
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of ident...
Most people are surprised to hear how they really sound, as the American media uses the call of the red-tailed hawk when showing an eagle. They don’t think the eagle sounds regal enough. And so we lie to ourselves about the very identity of our nat...
Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined...
She's wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she's a cartoon character—all of which are appealing alternatives.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one...
Young men list music as their focus and means of identity -- before sport, before TV, before cinema -- while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second.
In short, superheroes balance the forces of light and dark, rage and serenity, and the sacred and the profane within themselves and from it forge an identity that is powerful and purposeful.
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its i...
We are our stories - dozens, hundreds, thousands of them - sprayed across our memories, embedded in our identity. Calling them up for others or for ourselves or for God, can enlighten, crush, amuse, trap, or free us, depending on how we pay attention...
For a long time, we assume we know who we are, until the moment we fully realize who that is; in that moment, identity is no longer predictable, but rather takes the form of a truth that, like any other, can become a sentence with no more than a chan...
A brick, with its rigid conformity, could be used as a model for how the government wants its citizens to be treated. Every brick in this country is equal, and as such they should be identical, and line up in a straight line and keep quiet. And they ...
By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readil...
