Quotes About Individuality

I am son of man and woman, so they tell me. That astounds me . . . I thought myself more!

If I exist, I am not another

It would be much better for you to give up thinking of God and to create your own justice, since it is refused you.

I just don't give a damn, woman. White or black, I want you for what you are.

If I existed 200 years ago, all the other farmers in my community would be like, 'That guy is worthless! He's sitting on a rock, jumping up like a frog, coming up with weird concepts and ideas, making faces, and combing his hair into a giant pastry.' It's a good thing I was born in this century, when superfluous television seems to be part of the economy.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

Differences can be a strength.

Everyone has a beauty, but not every one sees it

Hawks and eagles don't fly together. They are of totally different kind.

There are no rules in life. Whether it is written down, or spoken by shamans, nothing binds a man beyond himself. Nothing, save the chains he accepts for himself. Laws and traditions mean nothing, if you have the strength.

I am not you and all my choices have already been made, good and bad.

If he had learned anything in manhood, it was that it didn't matter what other people thought of him—even the ones he respected. In the end, he would patch together a life, with its sorry errors and its triumphs, just as they had.

Better to follow a woman's example than mindlessly heed the dictates of men.

Human nature doesn't include all human beings. There are human beings who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything.

Separate we come, and separate we go, and this be it known, is all that we know.

Know thyself! That was the best joke ever perpetrated. A steaming universe of germ-cells, a maelstrom of animal forces, of which he himself, his personality, was only the collective gleam.

There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.

Remember, "being earnest" does not mean mimicking Hemingway.

To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.

Why do so many of us, when we sit down to write, sound like word processors rather than wordsmiths? Why do we spew the slogans of the consumer culture we work for, rather than sounding like the bards we want to be?

Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

And if you can't make your life as you'd wish it, try, at the very least, to accomplish this much: do not make it less than what it already is by mixing too excessively with the masses, by hanging around and endlessly chattering. Don't cheapen your life by parading it around, hauling it everywhere and laying it out there for the dreary humbug of familiars and fellowship, until it comes to feel like a curious dead weight.

You've been trying to pretend to be a boy; you've sensed, rightly or wrongly, that your father would have preferred to have a boy, but there is nothing superior about being a boy. You be yourself, a beautiful woman with brains and knowledge, and be glad to be yourself. Then you will have a happy life.