Quotes About Individuality

Everyone has a private life, the things they love and think no one else could really understand.

You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.

Brian told Mom we needed to keep Maureen away from those nutty Pentecostals, but Mom said we all came to religion in our own individual ways and we each need to respect the religious practices of others, seeing as it was up to every human being to find his or her own way to heaven.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

A lady's hair is her crowning glory

Mom and Dad liked to make a big point about never surrendering to fear or to prejudice or to the narrow-minded conformist sticks-in-the-mud who tried to tell everyone else what was proper.

I'd rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than with trashy lawn ornaments.

The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said the name was too Mexican. I thought we weren't supposed to be prejudiced, I said. It's not being prejudiced, Mom said. It's a matter of accuracy in labeling.

What struck me most was his crooked grin, like he saw the world in his own special way and got a kick out of it.

Life's too short to worry about what other people think... Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.

Life's too short to worry about what other people think,'' Mom said.''Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.

I'm a grown woman now," Mom said almost every morning. "Why can't I do what I want to do?

We each needed to respect the religious practices of others, seeing as it was up to every human being to find his or her own way to heaven

I never met a kid I couldn't teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the next day.

Life is too short to worry about what other people think

One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Everyone assumed I was a normal person, she said. It was weird.

Thing is," she continues, "Seymour can be with women. But he"—she searches for the right words—"he'd rather be with men.

Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We'd go with her and she'd give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. You'd be destroying what makes it special, she said. It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Eventually, even Mom acknowledged that I'd done all right. "No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.

Don't be someone else's little cheerleader", Mom said. "Be the star of your own show. Even if there's no audience.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other's imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.