Quotes About Individuality

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.

The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but...each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.

Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?

She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!

She is still a bundle of engaging possibilities rather than a finished picture. Of the mother there is nothing to say, for that excellent lady evidently requires familiar surroundings to bring out such small individuality as she possesses. In the unfamiliar she becomes invisible; and Longlands and she will never be visible to each other.

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And

Don't let us be like all the others! she protested.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

Não é verdade, monsieur, que o grande valor está em manter a própria liberdade intelectual, em não escravizar o nosso poder de apreciação, a nossa independência crítica?

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.

Ali znate, nas dve smo toliko razli?ite: ona voli da bude dobra, a ja volim da budem sre?na.

Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart?

No debes pensar que una chica sabe tan poco como imaginan sus padres. Una oye, una se da cuenta..., una tiene sus propios sentimientos e ideas.

all virtues are not equally becoming to all men and at all times.

I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears."106

Later I would know some real workers—heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping—and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos.

He'd lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean.

I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power.

No two people ever read the same book.