Quotes About Individuality

You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it. Feel your way, and don't stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it's one with something to look at out of the window.

A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.

The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You'll be cool when you're dead.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

It's okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That's the one with a story.

Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn't something you earn. Your worth isn't something you buy. Your worth isn't something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn't disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.

To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn't fit in was because I didn't want to.

Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.

Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of 'what ifs'. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.

The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn't this objective unchangeable thing called 'The World'. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.

But if everyone was made to look perfect, then no one would be special because being special meant being different, by offering something that wasn't on offer elsewhere.

You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.

Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.

There was an old musician's cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano.

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming...

She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

And yet, everything was different. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.