User:Demosthenes Taylor

I am what I am what I am. — Popeye the Sailor

O, this learning, what a thing it is! — William Shakespeare

For my part I am one of the number nos numerus sumus, (we are mere ciphers): I do not deny it, I have only this of Macrobius to say for myself, Omne meum, nihil meum, 'tis all mine, and none mine. As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, I have laboriously collected this Cento out of divers writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own. — Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

"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." — Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children