نحن نتخلى عن ثلاثة أرباع أنفسنا لكي نصبح مثل الأخرين

We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder's image of us: three fifths of a human being.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

We resemble ourselves.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.

That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

Nous sommes si accoutumés à nous déguiser aux autres qu’enfin nous nous déguisons à nous-mêmes.

Wanting to be someone else is the waste of who you are

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

Some of us learn from other people’s mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.