Quotes About Individuality

Don't you ever realise, said Helen, that the way we live is unlike the way other people live? On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.

Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.

Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.' 'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly. 'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

You were... Well, you were who you were.' 'We're all that,' says Claudia. 'It's something one has to overcome.

Find something to do,' says Claudia. I can't, shouts Lisa, I can't I can't I can't I don't know where to find it I don't know where to look I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.

Everyone can run the race, but not at the same pace.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love. Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

To belong to something - that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms.

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

The paintings were a history of his inward life, and he did not particularly care how they fared in the exterior world of change and decay.

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.

She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?

men in high collars who might—this

Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.

That, child, is one of the glorious advantages to being a madman. I don't have to make sense. It's very liberating. You should try it sometime.

Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.

One cannot hire a hand—the whole man always comes with it

Schools everywhere are organized on the assumption that there is only one right way to learn and that it is the same way for everybody.

Resist the temptation to redesign seats on the bus to specific personalities (except for the exceptionally rare genius)

Vivo de aquello que los otros no saben de mí

Cuanto más me doy cuenta de lo mucho que tengo en común con todos, tanto menos solidario me siento con uno determinado.

La pelea es como la guerra en pequeño, pero con la diferencia de que la guerra se desata entre personas ficticias, los estados, de tal manera que las personas físicas de carne y hueso solo son utilizadas como medios; en cambio, en la simple pelea, los que pelean son los dueños de su propia voluntad y no súbditos de la persona ficticia a la que obedecen cuando hay guerra.