Quotes About Individuality

because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.

It used to be about trying to do something. Now it's about trying to be someone.

If you set out to be liked, you will accomplish nothing.

Let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have it in them to do so.

I can't be a rose in any man's lapel.

Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in 'unfeminine' ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition.

Seventh grade. Eleven years old. A bookworm-misfit with long black braids, childish white socks, pointy pink glasses, and no courage for flirting. It's doesn't take long to learn that I'm ridiculous.

They tell me they do not believe that people are either black or white-- if that were so, then mixed-race children would all be gray instead of a myriad lovely warm shades of natural brown.

Why can't she see that no two people are exactly alike? Our hearts and minds are all different. Only our dreams share this same desperate need to rise and soar...

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

We are not different nor alike But each strange in his leather body sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands and loving is an act that cannot outlive the open hand the open eye the door in the chest standing open.

Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.

With living creatures / one must begin very early / to dwarf their growth : / the bound feet, / the crippled brain, / the hair curlers, / the hands you / love to touch.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.

She was a mighty woman, tall as he was, and built on aggressive lines, like a battleship, with a square squat head to which the iron-grey hair was bound as tight as possible in an intricate mystery of tiny plaits. He

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

As I see it, the word "private" is going plumb out of date. It's goin' to be an ole-fashioned concep', mark my words. That's a prophecy.

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different.

I catch myself thinking that I'm not physically visible, that whoever I'm talking to is responding to my personality, not my person.