Quotes About Individuality

I had a girl friend, named Geneva, a kind of loud, raunchy girl ... and she was always into something. Naturally she was my best friend, since I was never into anything. I was skinny and scared and so I followed her and got into all her shit. Nobody else wanted me, really, and you know that nobody else wanted her.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

I am what time, circumstance, and history have made of me, certainly, but i am also much more than that. So are we all.

I know that I was christened Clementine, and so it would make sense if people called me Clem, or even, come to think of it, Clementine, since that's my name: but they don't. People call me Tish.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him - he may be forced to - but nothing will efface his origins, the mark of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station.

Whether he is with others or not he is certainly alone.

I don't know, I'm just my mother's son. Sometimes that's all that makes the difference between us and them.

Él no era el negro de nadie. Y eso es un crimen en este país de mierda que, según dicen, es libre. Aquí, uno tiene que ser el negro de alguien.

people love different people in different ways—

retired into that strong self-pity which was, perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to him

We think that once one has discovered that thirty thousand, let us say, Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans or whatever have syphilis or don't, or are unemployed or not, that we've discovered something about the Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans. But in fact, this is not so. In fact, we've discovered nothing very useful because people cannot be handled in that way.

What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer too

She is a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at, whatever the fuck that means in this kingdom of the blind.

I won't stop being intelligent. I'll read and argue and think and all that—and I'll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts—and you'll be pleased because I'm sure the resulting confusion will cause you to see that I've only got a finite woman's mind, after all.

you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black." —James Baldwin

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the life you have, you won't live some other life. You won't live any life at all.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice. It's an observation.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

All men, clearly, are primitive, but it can be doubted that that all men are primitive in the same way

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. (1879-1958)

A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book means thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.