Source: My Autobiography (p. 271 Simon and Schuster 1964 edition)
“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different”
My Autobiography (p. 271 Simon and Schuster 1964 edition)
Context: I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.
Midnight's Children (1981)
Context: Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
Day of Affirmation Address (1966)
“I am proud to be an Ethiopian. I am proud to be a part of that history.”
Meles speaking to American intellectuals about Ethiopia and its history, as quoted in Harold G. Marcus, "A Breakfast Meeting with Prime Minister Meles", Michigan State University. 20 October, 1995.
Variant: I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
Source: Notes of a Native Son
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 172
1940s
“What am I? I am the desire not to die.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled — not that evening alone — by the need to construct the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.
“When I am asleep, I dream what I dream when I am awake. It's a continuous dream.”
Durmiendo sueño lo que despierto sueño. Y mi soñar es continuo.
Voces (1943)
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Source: Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: Nestor
