Identical Twins Quotes

Identical twins do not possess identical souls. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

She's always sniffing the bottles in the spice cabinet."
I didn't know she'd even noticed. At first it was just curiosity; why did fennel and cumin, identical twins, have such opposing personalities? I had crushed the seeds beneath my fingertips, where the scents lingered for hours. Another day I'd opened a bottle of nutmeg, startled when the little spheres came rattling out in a mothball-scented cloud. How could something so delicate have such a ferocious smell? And I watched, fascinated, as the supple, plump, purple vanilla beans withered into brittle pods and surrendered their perfume to the air. The spices were all so interesting; it was impossible to walk through the kitchen without opening the cupboard to find out what was going on in there. ~ Ruth Reichl

Identical twins
are no different
from everyone else,
except we look and
sometimes sound
exactly alike. ~ Kwame Alexander

Every child is a one of a kind mini-masterpiece. No known duplicates exist. They each have distinctive fingerprints, heart rhythms, eye patterns, and blood constitution. Even identical twins can be physically alike and yet light years apart in how they are mentally wired and gifted. Our children do not just grow up different; they show up different. Though circumstances and training will greatly affect their lives, the originality that is already ingrained into each of our children reflects brilliant preplanning. Every birthmark is a trademark. Every special feature is a signature of divine design. ~ Stephen Kendrick

Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever - not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins. ~ Gerald Edelman

With identical twins, you always get a little snidey one. ~ Karl Pilkington

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children's intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. ~ Steven Pinker

Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins. ~ Richard Dawkins

Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others. ~ Wally Lamb

My name is Abe Marcus. Ned and I are identical twins. We look exactly alike. Even Ma and Pa can't tell us apart. But we don't act alike. I am the serious twin. Maybe it's because I am two minutes older. ~ R.L. Stine

Without identical twins, you'll never get to experience entering a hotel room with one of them and watching him run into the full-length mirror because he though he saw his brother. ~ Ray Romano

Among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one may die early of a heart attack and the other may live a long, healthy life - depending on their lifestyle and what they eat. ~ Michael Greger

There are no identical twins, or forgivable sins. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

It might be extremely dorky to point out, but who you are is singular. It's science. No one else in existence has your point of view or exact genome (identical twins and clones, look for inspiration elsewhere, please). That is why we need people to share and help us understand one another better. And on a bigger level than just taking a selfie. (Not hating on selfies, but a few is enough. You look good from that angle; we get it.) We need the world to hear more opinions, give glimpses into more diverse subcultures. Are you REALLY into dressing your cat in handcrafted, historically authentic outfits? No problem, there are people out there who want to see that! Probably in excruciating detail! ~ Felicia Day

The nurse pointed out that identical twins were already clones in a sense, and Mother Emmanuel suggested that the soul to worry about belonged to the person who would have himself cloned at great expense when so many unwanted children were going hungry. ~ Mark Salzman

In some domains it looks as though our identical twins reared apart are ... just as similar as identical twins reared together. Now that's an amazing finding and I can assure you none of us would have expected that degree of similarity. ~ Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr.

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you've committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let's say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it's morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can't have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intu ~ Sam Harris

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case. ~ Sam Harris

Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the "big five": neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness.15 These traits are facts about the elephant, about a person's automatic reactions to various situations. They are fairly similar between identical twins reared apart, indicating that they are influenced in part by genes, although they are also influenced by changes in the conditions of one's life or the roles one plays, such as becoming a parent.16 But psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels...

The third level of personality is that of the "life story." Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them wherever we can. (See those seven stars up there? They are seven sisters who once . . . ) It's no different with our own lives. We can't stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an "evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth."18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people's thoughts about you. The life story is not the work of a historian - remember that the rider has no access to the real causes of your behavior; it i ~ Jonathan Haidt

Even identical twins have their own differences. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women. ~ Robert Kroese

Identical twins. I'm glad they're identical 'cause you save money on photographs. That's what I like. Yeah. Here's my little boy. I got another one just like it. ~ Ray Romano

You can spend too much time wondering which of identical twins is the more alike. ~ Robert Breault

She was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head. ~ Chinua Achebe

Seamus tossed down two of his cards. "Hell. I'd train her if Tristan asked me. Wouldn't mind seeing that pretty face every day."
I studied my cards, pretending not to hear him.
"Maybe I should offer to work with her," he said. "Free you up so you can get back to doing what you love."
My jaw tightened.
"You go kill things, and I'll show the lass some Irish moves. Win-win situation for both of us, right?"
The cards in my hand began to buckle.
"Ha!" Seamus gave Niall a victorious grin. "Pay up, bro."
Niall's mouth turned down. "You don't even like that album."
"I said it wasn't my favorite one, but you know I like all of Johnny Cash's stuff."
"Since when?"
I stared at the two brothers with a mix of irritation and confusion.
"What are you two going on about?" Chris asked.
Seamus looked at me with a smug expression. "I told Niall you had it bad for the lass. He said she was too young and sweet to interest you. We made a friendly wager, which he just lost."
"You don't have proof he's into her," Niall argued. "He just might not want your ugly mug around her."
Seamus snorted. "You do realize we're identical twins."
"I'm still better looking. ~ Karen Lynch

Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

And here, out in the darkness, identical twins were stalking each other, one of them with murder on his mind. ~ Anthony Horowitz

As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. ~ Otto Hermann Kahn

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. ~ Rollo May

If you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and ontinually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard as deserving of annihilation, any suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart (and this is perhaps the mother of the former)-the religion of smug ease. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones!for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase. ~ Ali Smith

You never have enough competition at any position, ... Several of the players listed at right wing have played center in the NHL, like Trevor Linden. Some can play both wings. I've been skating on a line with the Sedin twins. They are a lot more skilled than some people give them credit. Look at their point totals and they are right up there in their point-per-minute averages. My job will be to complement them and try to get our line to provide secondary scoring behind the big line of Naslund, Bertuzzi and Morrison. Those guys look good and I expect they'll be the top line in the NHL again. ~ Anson Carter

A lot of the women that I treat will tell me that when they talk to their siblings or mothers they very often have similar challenges. One could make the case that it's nurture, not nature because these twins were brought up together, but you can't rule out the genetic argument. ~ Laura Berman

When we think of discrimination, these are types of ugly, virulent prejudice that we think about. But John faced a much different kind of prejudice when he entered the job market as a new minted PhD in 1995. Although he applied to more than 150 academic jobs and had completed several field experiments, he was given only one interview. He later discovered that other nearly identical applicants received thirty interviews from just forty or so applications. The main difference between John and these other applicants was that John received his PhD from the University of Wyoming whereas they have received theirs from "brand-name" schools like Harvard and Princeton. ~ Uri Gneezy

They have statues," Jenna said. "In a hallway." Sure enough, two bronze statues of veiled women guarded the massive staircase, where even more people were now lining up. They were all wearing black uniforms, and had nearly identical smiles plastered on their faces.
"What are those people doing?" Jenna whispered to me.
"I don't know," I replied through a frozen grin, "but I'm afraid a musical number might be involved."
"This is our household staff," Dad said, sweeping his arm toward the group. "Anything you need, they'll be happy to help you with."
"Oh," I said weakly, feeling like my voice echoed in the cavernous room. "Great. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Every two months, I would get an email, 'Skeleton Twins update: still don't have the money!' ~ Bill Hader

I grabbed another. Aerosmith. Nope, can't throw classic Aerosmith. I snatched a copy of the Thompson Twins' greatest hits and chucked it at him. ~ Rachel Vincent

My twin's not broken. He's ruined. Do you understand the difference? With broken, maybe you can fix things. Ruined? All you can do is wait to bury him. ~ J.R. Ward

Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W. Bush did. ~ Adam McKay

The twin guardian angels whose eyes and hands and wings had focused protective attention on the souls that lay there no longer faced each other. They stared blindly into a random middle distance. The scroll they held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken in two. ~ Clare Morgan

Injun Joe studied the body for a moment, his eyes sad. Then he said, "I'd rather go in my sleep, I think." He glanced back at me. "What about you?"
"I want to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex with identical triplet cheerleaders," I said. ~ Jim Butcher

It wasn't cool of Dad to keep that secret. A secret with Valerie. Secret from me. But it's not like I'm going to cry about it. When the crier finally catches her breath, she says, "How come Naomi gets a twin and I don't?" Which makes no sense at all. "We're not twins," I say in maybe not my nicest voice. "We just have the same name!" I walk over to the couch where she's sprawled. "What's your name?" She sits up and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Ew. "Brianna." "Didn't you ever meet another Brianna?" The other Naomi walks over to us, like maybe I should back off her sister or something even though I'm only trying to help. "Remember in your dance class? ~ Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich

When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can't be sold on its merits. I'd be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. Remember, I'm the kid who couldn't play competitive games. I'd much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition. ~ Yvon Chouinard

I lost twins at 14 weeks, and I had to have an D and C on my birthday. ~ Amy Weber

Talent and success are cousins;
genius and excellence are twins. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Catastrophe and creation are twins. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Sire," Oliver said as he helped Petunia to her feet, "I'd like to marry Petunia.
"Of course you would," retorted the King Gregor. "But not right now! we just got those two taken care of." He pointed to the twins who were still trying to play Christian's odd game. "And weddings are expensive! ~ Jessica Day George

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else. ~ Kim Edwards

Sometimes as I'm drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere - there, there, and there - it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun. ~ Lorrie Moore

And as I sat beneath florescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard. ~ John Green

Twin, I think you should not have dreamt that, for I didn't, and Peter may say we oughtn't to dream differently, being twins, you know. ~ J.M. Barrie

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity. ~ Margaret Atwood

I've got four nipples. I think I must have been a twin, but the one other went away and left its nipples behind. ~ Harry Styles

Earthquake - the earthquake of November 23, 1980, with its infinite destruction - entered into our bones. It expelled the habit of stability and solidity, the confidence that every second would be identical to the next, the familiarity of ~ Elena Ferrante

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late. ~ Jodi Picoult

Glancing around the entrance hall, she realized the crate was no longer in the corner. The twins must have raced downstairs the moment it had been mentioned. Clutching it on either side, they lugged it furtively toward the receiving room.
"Girls," Kathleen said sharply, "bring that back here at once!"
But it was too late. The receiving room's double doors closed, accompanied by the click of a key turning in the lock. Kathleen stopped short, her jaw slackening.
West and Helen staggered together, overcome with hilarity.
"I'll have you know," Mrs. Church said in amazement, "it took our two stoutest footmen to bring that crate into the house. How did two young ladies manage to carry it away so quickly?"
"Sh-sheer determination," Helen wheezed.
"All I want in this life," West told Kathleen, "is to see you try to pry that crate away from those two."
"I wouldn't dare," she replied, giving up. "They would do me bodily harm. ~ Lisa Kleypas

We'd never trained together, but we moved like twins, veterans of countless battles at each other's side.
She really was a master. In less than five minutes, she'd learned to work in tandem with me. When she realized I could use a free arm or leg to knock her clear of an attack, she turned and faced the next enemy head on, without any intent of dodging. A Mimic foreleg came within a hand's breadth of her face and she didn't even flinch. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Anyone who has raised more than one child knows full well that kids turn out the way they turn out - astonishingly, for the most part, and usually quite unlike their siblings, even their twins, raised under the same flawed rooftree. Little we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, seems to have made much mark. It's hubris to suppose ourselves so influential; a casual remark on the playground is as likely to change their lives as any dedicated campaign of ours. They come with much of their own software already in place, waiting, and none of the keys we press will override it. ~ Barbara Holland

The days were heavy and sticky. All identical, one the same as the other. Soon they would even get rid of their one remaining distinction, the shell of their names: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. ~ Ismail Kadare

I had twins, so it was really uncomfortable [to sleep], because you lay on one side, and there's a baby, and you lay on the other side and there's a baby. So I had a really hard time with it. ~ Jennifer Lopez

Perfection isn't everything," she said as she turned and walked away. "I think the flaws are what make it perfect. ~ Trisha Leaver

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behaviour, to other minds. ~ Aldous Huxley

I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition. ~ Don DeLillo

John Law's life and his Mississippi Scheme had followed an identical arc of trajectory. Law had been both the maker and breaker of the Mississippi Scheme just as the Mississippi Scheme had been both the maker and breaker of Law. ~ Gavin John Adams