Quotes About Individuality

There is no one great man. Only millions of men and women in possession of tiny pieces of greatness, which when put together, when assembled in the aggregate make the whole. I am a piece of a very large jigsaw puzzle. One of the corner pieces. The one you go for first - important for a time, different from most of the others. But then, in the end, in the big picture, just one of many.

If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.

People who have taught themselves how to live — what to be, what to do — from reading great works will not be overly susceptible to the culture industry's latest wares. They'll be able to sample them, or turn completely away—they'll have better things on their minds.

The best beginning reads is often the one with the wherewithal to admit that, living in the midst of what appears to be a confident, energetic culture, he among all the rest is lost.

Mourning has no timetable. Grief is not the same for everyone. And it does not necessarily go away. The healthiest way to deal with it is to lean into it, rather than try to keep it at bay. In the attempt to fit in, to be normal, we end up feeling estranged.

It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.

self-identity ("This is who I am and the only way I feel confident, competent, and in control").

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

I want my name to mean me.

To show them who you are.

dislodge the cultural brainwash that makes so many people so completely miserable. I

All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn't define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that's fine.

The last few years I became a lot more into sports. Growing up, the sports I liked were independent sports, like skateboarding. I was really into skateboarding, and not necessarily team televised sports.

To me, clothing is a form of self-expression - there are hints about who you are in what you wear.

my admittedly peculiar life.

John Lennon was everything his friends wanted to be, and said everything they wanted to say but wouldn't dare. John Lennon always dared.

Expelled from the art institute for, among other reasons, drawing nudes as a single straight line, à la Cocteau, he was a young man of 21 well versed in "acts of a rebellion against the squares.

Any asshole with a Masters in Social Work can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can't mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blond.

The romantic wants to create a world where he or she will possess a fully integrated, unconflicted identity—where the answers to the questions Who am I? and What are we? are exactly the same.

All of us are walking contradictions made of mismatched parts and anomalies.

If you feel the need to make everyone happy, you should be a wedding planner not a leader.