Quotes About Individuality

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

There's a lot I don't tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn't understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky. The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, 'Thanks for asking, but I'm really not into white guys right now.

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.

It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me. 'Turn a bit to the left, Jean-Claude. I long to capture the playful quality of your buttocks.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for _who_ I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for _what_ you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven't got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me.

What if I'd wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn't really matter? Try as I might, I still can't wrap my mind around it.

What you call your personality, you know?—it's not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder.

It's as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, Ick, who are you?

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Having spent my life trying to fit the will of others, I was unable to distinguish between what I enjoyed and what I thought I should enjoy.

Wpasowywanie siÄ™ to nie nasza rzecz. My nie z takich, co siÄ™ wpasowujÄ….

If you think I'm putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you

There's an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: "Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape." Is there a richer or more complex story than that?

could it be???? Timothy Speaks, who had so many pierced holes in his ears you could have torn the lobe right off, effortlessly ripped it loose the same way you might separate a stamp from a sheet.

even then that without them, I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy—and