Quotes About Individuality

Don't you think they're as bored as you are? You think you're somebody special? You think I wake up everyday so happy to see you? You're a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life?

If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

You have to be somebody," Lanier writes, "before you can share yourself." But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present—early, and the same as everyone else's.

Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!' No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do something. 20

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swinging—roiling—in a mode long since memorialized by catwalk models, drag queens, prima donnas, freaks and queers, street punks of all persuasions.

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.

There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion.

He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present - early, and the same as everyone else's.

Everybody's path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths—they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way—and of course millions of people felt as I did.