Quotes About Individuality

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted to do all along.

Hild unpinned her sleeves to show arms tan and tight as a stripling's wore a light cloak in royal blue flung back from her shoulder gesith-style, and tucked her hair behind her ears, to remind them of fighting man with greased-back hair

Gwaldus tugged at her collar again. She looked nothing like Hereswith. She was at least two years older, half a hand shorter. Her eyes were grey-green, and her hair would be paler when washed. Her whole body would be paler. Her nipples were more pink than red.

She was baptised to Christ-their name for the pattern, her path, her wyrd. She was still herself.

In this light, her hair was the colr of sandstone. She was sandstone: a spire of rock rising from an otherwise featureless desert. No toeholds.

When a time came to carve her name, would it be Dawnged, girl of Ystrad, T´ywi or Tâl, payment to Elen, or would she one day find her true name?

Without anyone to please, she no longer bent and swayed. No longer willow but oak.

She looked nothing like that young wife, and nothing like the men with hair on their faces. Her mother's hair, almost, but not her eyes.

Hild looked down at her reflection. A tall, obdurate woman gazed back. Blue-green veil band embroidered with gold-and-silver thread, sewn with lapis and agate and beryl. Agate swinging from each ear. Heavy yellow gold resting between her breasts. Dyed-blue girdle. A matching purse with ivory lid.

She was taller than all the unmatched girls, even the ones with breast buds, just as her mother was taller than the queen and Cian was unusually tall for a boy with a wealh mother.

No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.

It occurred to Hild that both Hereswith and Cian now had their own paths. She had only her mother's dream.

There was no world in which she would be queen to another's king. Eanflæd would be peaceweaver. She was the light of the world.

You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes for your own good.

Conformism and non-conformism are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Finding himself,' for modern man, means dissolving himself in any collective entity.

The idea of "the free development of personality" seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely.

Egalitarian societies strangle the imagination without even satisfying envy.

The correct use of liberty can consist in adhering to a destiny, but my liberty consists in being able to refuse to do that. The right to fail is an important right of man.

Nobody finds himself by searching merely for himself. Personality is born out of conflict with a norm.

For the trunk of individuality to grow, one must prevent freedom from making the trunk spread out into branches.

Sociological categories authorize us to move about in society without paying attention to each man's irreplaceable individuality. Sociology is the ideology of our indifference toward our neighbor.

Vulgarity consists in striving to be what we are not.