I don’t fit into any demographic, I never really have. But that’s true of lots of us, especially people my age and younger who’ve grown up with complicated identities, because life has gotten more complicated, and in which we don’t want to be defined by any single one of them, but are happy to present many facets of our interests and personalities.

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

Life is dynamic and complex, and it’s also simple. We’re all more alike than we think we are.

It's all a part of this world where we're all kind of mixing a lot, and… in that way we're all a bit confused about who we are, where we belong, where's home, and … who is important to us…

Every individual is multicultural; cultures are not monolithic islands but criss-crossed alluvial plains. Individual identity stems from the encounter of multiple collective identities within one and the same person; each of our various affiliations contributes to the formation of the unique creature that we are. Human beings are not all similar, or entirely different; they are all plural within themselves, and share their constitutive traits with very varied groups, combining them in an individual way. The cohabitation of different types of belonging within each one of us does not in general cause any problems- and this ought , in turn, to arouse admiration: like a juggler, we keep all the balls of our identity in the air at once, with the greatest ease!
Individual identity results from the interweaving of several collective identities; it is not alone in this respect. What is the origin of the culture of a human group? The reply- paradoxically- is that it comes from previous cultures. A new culture arises from the encounter between several smaller cultures, or from the decomposition of a bigger culture, or from interaction with neighboring culture. There is never a human life prior to the advent of culture.

And I think that we are richer for it if we identify with what we really are. The question of diversity for me is far deeper than the narrow, silo approach that we are seeing on diversity now.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society.

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

…A lot of women write about messy, complex and complicated things. Our lives and experiences as women are complicated, and very dense, and on some levels, I think more multidimensional, because we have a whole lot more to deal with. Men don’t have periods. They don’t have babies, and nowadays they don’t have to worry about just taking care of a family. We women do all of that. And so, I find on some levels, our lives are a little bit more interesting…

We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

We're at an era where a lot of people are beginning to step in, in a really firm way, into their identities. Whether people are saying...they're born with one sex, they say: I'm actually another gender—that's who I am; or people are claiming their cultural heritage in a more profound way than they have in the past...For any number of reasons, we have an opportunity to construct our identities that are more honest and open and true to who we are than what we've been handed at birth.

I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world’s stories should be told — from many different perspectives.