Quotes About Individuality

But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.

I won't claim I've never in my life done anything I'm ashamed of, but I haven't done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I've made, that's fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Did he, in a way he was unable to articulate, actually like my strong will? Or did he mistake me for a typical woman, was he game to be my boyfriend not because I was Hillary and distinctly myself but because I possessed the standard feminine qualities that a college-educated man in the late 1960s might wish for? Did he not understand that I was special?

You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing.

don't blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.

I enjoy almost everything I do, perhaps because when I don't enjoy something, I don't do it. I enjoy writing; I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having a family to live among. I am neither a feminist nor an antifeminist, because it seems to me that we are first human beings and after that men and women. Human beings have, so far, proved interesting enough to keep me busy just trying to figure out what might be right and true about them.

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

Always resemble yourself.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. [ The New Statesman , February 25, 1933]

art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

The true enemy of man is generalization.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...

Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.

Los hombres y las mujeres deberían saber que no es posible unirse totalmente en este mundo. En el beso más íntimo, en la caricia más tierna existe un foso, por estrecho que sea. Y frente a él deben inclinarse y someterse con respeto. [...] Él es él y ella es ella y esa distancia nunca se salvará.

though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can't, an' nobody can, i'd better hold my peace, an' try an' life my own life: if i've got one to live, which i rather doubt.

The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.

If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said lugubriously.

His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited.

Lord'. I help the pastor unload the car and carry stuff to a cake stand right next to the train tracks. He installs me there, as caretaker of the cake stand, and – get this – I have to wear a fucken choir gown. Vernon Gucci Little, in his unfashionable Jordan New Jacks, with fucken choir gown.

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.