Quotes About Individuality

It almost seems un-American, at times, to have kids who are slow to warm up. Other people tell us to push them—to force them to jump in—and they reprimand us for babying them. When your child adapts slowly, remind yourself that you will appreciate it when he is an adolescent. While all the other kids are running off on some ridiculous impulsive venture, yours will be thinking, moving slowly and cautiously. There are strengths to every temperamental characteristic.

Because they are more, much of the advice that works for raising other children is ineffective with spirited kids. To ignore your child's tantrums is ridiculous. He can rage for an hour because you opened the door when he was expecting to do it himself.

Just as one would never attempt to turn a sports car into a utility truck, it is also critical to avoid the mistake of telling a child who is temperamentally intense, energetic, and sensitive not to be any of those things.

THE BONUS CHARACTERISTICS are not common to all spirited kids, but if your child possesses any of them, you will need to be even more enterprising. Not only are you living with a child who is more, but you're also faced with the exhaustion of life with a child who is energetic, rarely falls into a predictable sleeping and eating schedule, expresses a strong resistance to new situations and things, and shares fewer rewarding smiles. Don't despair. These too have their potential.

Love your spirited child for who she is. Let her make you laugh. Let her share with you how she sees, hears, and experiences the things around her. Allow her to enrich your life. Because she is more, she will make you more.

Each of us shines in a different way, but this doesn't make our light less bright. —Albert Einstein

Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you...

It's none of my business what other people think of me.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

If you are wise, you will never forget that your heart is yours alone. It can be the greatest gift, but never can it be commanded.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

Prudent people are very happy 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.

There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.

I relish my life. It's the one I have. It's difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it's mine.

I learned very early to choose my lines carefully. I still have a terrible habit, when people pause too long between words, of feeding them their line. I know my lines in advance. I dress for occasions, for personae. There are women in my closet, hanging on my hangers, a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.

I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife.

The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?

I relish my life. It is a life of which I am fiercely protective. I have wrested it back from madness, and madness cannot take it from me again. I will not throw it away. So what if it isn't a normal life? It's the one I have.

He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.

Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.