Quotes About Individuality

She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I

Irie gözlerini devirdi. Bazen insan farkl? olmak ister. Ama bazen de, herkes gibi olmak için, ba??ndaki saç? bile feda etmeye haz?rd?r.

It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.

And were they still like that, she wondered--these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of--as Howard might put it--desiring subjects?

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it -- if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett -- he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.

These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "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!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora—of whatever color or background or gender.

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something.

Irie verdrehte die Augen. Manchmal möchte man anders sein. Und manchmal würde man die Haare auf seinem Kopf hergeben, um so zu sein wie alle anderen.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur.

Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York's Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. When

She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That's what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped "Breton" T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her severe and beautiful African head—everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time, and with the place.

I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.

our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul.

the false courage of association with a crowd.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again. How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Pheoby, yuh got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God and they got tuh find out about livin fuh theyselves.

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.