Quotes About Individuality

The voice. It doesn't just matter what you say. It matters who does the saying. It matters whose voice it is.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

When you have a child, it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child get pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit.

There are some places a person can go where no one else can follow them. And sometimes you just have to trust that they know what they're doing.

But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact. And by just being you, it'll happen. Maybe not in big ways, but it'll happen.

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary

Most of the time I'm like, 'Why do I have to share a gender with you, you piece of shit?' It's like when you have a bad relative who has the same last name.

Why not try to use your 'outside voice'? You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

We each have only one voice, and the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap.

It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can't help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.

My mom always says, you don't have a self until you have a secret.

The world is blood-hot and personal. —Sylvia Plath

But she became Gabby's friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school's water fountains—you knew they would find each other.

There is no team in I

Remember that kind of wanting? That kind that's just for yourself? And you don't even have to feel guilty about it? You wouldn't know you should." Katie

She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

I've invented it, because there is no other word that celebrates the genius that is me.

Let me show you what I know of it," he murmured. "Your mouth can be considered a hundred ways. Rico would look at it and he would see the light and shade; Byron Sawyer would see the color; yet another artist might see the line. A hundred truths, and not one is wrong. There are no original ideas, darling, only original visions. Each of us would draw your lips a different way, yet none of us could capture the complete essence of them.

Some people lusted after cars, which had never made sense to me. For me, bookshelves could inspire whole spontaneous sonnets, so maybe it was an each to her own scenario.

People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it.

Sometimes," Joe said after a bit, "it's just easier to keep being what everyone expects you to be. Even if that's what you're not, anymore.