labels

Don't call me 'gentleman'. I work for a livin'.

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.

I think the very word stalking implies that you're not supposed to like it. Otherwise, it would be called 'fluffy harmless observation time'.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

A label locks me into a definition that people use to control me. A vision graces me with an idea that serves to release me.

I don't subscribe to labels. Unless I'm labeling other people.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

People don't want other people to be people.

Before label yourself and before you decide that there is something irreparably wrong with your thoughts or emotions, ask yourself: __o I have a caring, unconditionally loving best friend in myself?_ If the answer is __o,_ then you will not find the solution to your suffering until you address this serious, life-threatening absence of self-compassion. Self-love is not a dinner mint. Self-love matters. Self-love saves lives.

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

If there__ anything I__e learned from polyamory, it__ that the quickest way to destroy a relationship is to try to make it into something it__ not, to force it into a box that it doesn__ really fit in, and to slap labels on something and assume that those labels give the relationship value. No, no, and no. What you end up with is damaged goods in a mislabeled package that end up absolutely where you didn__ want to send the damn thing in the first place.

Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kind

Whatever we may be or not be to others, to ourselves we are always just ourselves.

One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.

Sometimes letting go is simply changing the labels you place on an event. Looking at the same event with fresh eyes.

I think unfortunately society nowadays picks upon the fact that we should all fit into this perfect little box, perfect little label. Everybody has to be labelled, because that's what makes human beings feel comfortable, I know what that is. If they can't do that, they start thinking that's obviously not right.