Quotes About Individuality

A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.

I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I'll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I'll feel resentful because it'll feel as I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.

There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.

You en't gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there's more to us than gyptian language. There's deeps in us and strong currents. We're water people all through, and you en't, you're a fire person. What you're most like is marsh fire, that's the place you have in the gyptian scheme. You got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that's what you are child.

Just be yourself. You don't have to put on an act. To be myself, I have to put on an act, Ginny said bitterly. What's that mean? It means I don't know who I am.

Streite mit allem, was du willst, aber nicht mit deiner eigenen Natur

But in another way it was easy, because it made sense. For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all of my nature and not only a part of it. So it was lonely for a while but then I got used to it.

She was not beautiful—she would never be that, nor pretty, nor conventionally attractive…

Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.

Everybody has the right to form their own opinion and read what they like and come to their own conclusion about it... I trust the reader.

La alabanza o la condena, la virtud o la culpa, han de aplicarse a nuestros actos, no a nuestra ascendencia ni a nuestra adscripción a este o aquel grupo.

Todo hombre está en poder de su espectro hasta que llega la hora en que su humanidad despierta… William Blake

There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.

Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're people.

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!

No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.

Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being!

I wouldn't so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!" Whereupon

Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

Even when she was dressed up she didn't look like a chosen person.

What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.