Quotes About Individuality

the classes themselves, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way school never had before. . .So I passed the class hours slouched in the back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care

There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young.

unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal

I had no idea that no one else would do it.

he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life weren't beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he'd known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchell's daughter. "Hey," she whispered, working her mouth free, "you come upstairs now.

If you believe the journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No.

Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.

I, insofar as I have an I

he appeared not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake).

beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure.

I'm allergic to Best Ofs, canon of all sorts, rankings, comparison. I love the bottomless Borgesian library.

True that you've got your own whole other body, up there?" "More or less. Somebody built it, but you couldn't tell." "True that you've got your own whole other body, up there?" "More or less. Somebody built it, but you couldn't tell." "Look like you?" "No," Flynne said, "prettier and tittier." "Go on," Clovis said, pull the other one.

She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.

Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn't look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn't liked her saying that, because it was true.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy's black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501's, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.

Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn't right. However odd things seem, mustn't it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one's own, and no one else's?

What I mean is... maybe it's only us...

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

We have to face it at last. We're not all human.