Quotes About Individuality

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

I am what I am. To look for 'reasons' is beside the point.

My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

Just so. I am what I am. To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.

These protests have about them an engaging period optimism, depending as they do upon the Rousseauean premise that most people, left to their own devices, think not in cliches but with originality and brilliance; that most individual voices, once heard, turn out to be voices of beauty and wisdom.

I am what I am. To look for «reasons» is beside the point.

there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and the other.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have know have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.

She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon...

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

Everyone has his or her Frrance, his or her Paris, just as everyone has his or her London or New York. This stubborn habit strikes me as self-protection, an old tribal instinct for never showing one's back. Not knowing, not having gotten there first (and pocketing the goods), seem to implicate us as fools or rubes.

No em clavis un sermó; els sermons són desoladors perquè son un ranxo, igual per a tothom, quan cada u sent el seu mal com a únic i intransferible.

You don't know what you're going to be faithful to in this world, do you? It was true I didn't have what other people had, I knew that, and yet I couldn't think of a single other life I envied - no, I couldn't - though I knew better than to try to get anyone to believe it.

I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.