Quotes About Individuality

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.

I mean, who are you if you can't make it up? Especially people like you and me. Are we just supposed to stay the shitheads our parents and high schools sent out into the world, the ones our classmates assumed would do nothing with our lives?

Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in your own mind, their struggles and triumphs connecting to your own until a book becomes like a piece of music you've played—and sometimes mastered—over a period of days, or weeks.

All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

on the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . .

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.

If I looked like you, Debra, I'd masturbate all the time

How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing—

Unless we are very young or lifelong fools, we do not look to artists --- or their biographers --- for our role models. Their work is enough.

But most blacks are prevented from this self-examination and self-criticism, because they don't think for themselves as individuals first; they instead willingly accept the opinions they know they are supposed to have as racial victims. They embrace the attitudes cued to them by black politicians and racial professionals.

But when you see yourself as an individual first, you are freed to think for yourself, and you become internally self-sufficient. You start to break free from the bonds of racial conformity, and you start to see the good and bad in everyone, irrespective of their color. You start to be less angry, and as you let go of anger you are empowered to love God, your family, and your country.

The decision to carve out time and attention to make your work is a breathtaking act of ego. You're saying, "I don't care what everyone else thinks I should be doing with my time. I know this is what I need to do." If

My grandfather said white people can't exist without speaking. He said they're all just imitations of each other, so it's like they have to speak to distinguish themselves.

I may be sick. I may come from a hole in the ground. My best friend may be an insect. But at least I don't live in decent society.

You are not the first, and will not be the last, to say so. I wear my "warped" label with pride.

I see perfection in things that are likely considered imperfections by others.

That's the thing about music. You get to make it mean whatever you need it to mean.

What is perceived as normal. That makes it other people's failings. Deficits. Not yours. Who the hell sets the standards, huh? Who gets to say how we are supposed to be? Or who we are supposed to be? And how dare anyone make you feel inadequate for being who you are? It's not okay. It pisses me off.

You don't get to pick which parts of me you find acceptable and throw away what you don't.

You have taught me that I am allowed to like myself as I am, at whatever stage I am in. I can change, I can stay the same, or I can be whoever it is that is right for me; but I can be satisfied. No, more than that. I can be proud. I can celebrate. That is what I am going to do.

I will never compromise on my poorly-thought-out, internally-inconsistent, quasi-irrational principles. That's just how I roll.

We are not goddamn statistics. We will never be. We are the exception, and we are exceptional. Got it?

But I do not fit well into any social mold whatsoever. That is not appealing to others.