Quotes About Individuality

The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.

Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later [...]. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it?

He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too—it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.

Noah couldn't do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that's no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval – it's not adult, is it?

poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.

One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn't justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as petite and unopinionated. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes short and bossy.

And secondly, reducing the diversity between people didn't result in harmony within. The narcissism of small differences ensured this.

he thought he probably wouldn't have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

Knygos tvirtina: ji padar? tai tod?l ir tod?l. Gyvenimas tvirtina: ji padar? tai. Tik knygose viskas paaiškinama, o gyvenime ni?niekas. Nesistebiu, kad kai kurie žmon?s teikia pirmenyb? knygoms. Knygos ?prasmina gyvenim?. Visa b?da, kad jos ?prasmina kit? žmoni? gyvenim?, bet ne tav?j?.

I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.

pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole

We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see—feel—only what is individual and particular to them.

People never outgrow wanting to be liked for being who they truly are, especially when they've grown up in the limelight or its shadowy edge.

I am who I am at any given moment…. That's the only way you can know me.

I have learned that everyone else in the world is boring except you.

Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O.McCaucus-Bigg A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn't Kinkade's name. O.McCaucus-Bigg? Braggart, are you? Kinkade would roar. Not as big as mine,laddie! A good joke, suitable for thirteen-year-old boys and bored sergeants and subalterns.

Plain girls who were also clever were a ha'pence a dozen.

Be kind to the spider. It's simply working hard to be itself. And don't tell the maids

Yes, Miss Masters, but walking is also a way to announce who you are. Gideon waved one arm impassionedly. How you view yourself in the world. The way you hold yourself, the way you move, how you occupy a space, tells other people a good deal about you, ~from To Love a Thief