Quotes About Individuality

I don't know all the keys to success, but one key to failure is to try to please everyone. Being controlled by the opinions of others is a guaranteed way to miss God's purposes for your life.

Each of us is an original.

Many people are driven by the need for approval. They allow the expectations of parents or spouses or children or teachers or friends to control their lives. Many adults are still trying to earn the approval of unpleasable parents. Others are driven by peer pressure, always worried by what others might think. Unfortunately, those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

Gary wondered, 'If God intentionally made us all different, why should everyone be expected to love God in the same way?

Surrendering is not repressing your personality. God wants to use your unique personality. Rather than its being diminished, surrendering enhances it. C. S. Lewis observed, "The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become — because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

I'm always so glad, Sylvie murmured, that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.

I don't think I'd mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted - which is nothing in particular, it's true, but I like being alone in my head, I'm used to it.

Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

Pamela wanted to die with her own hips and her own teeth; beyond that she didn't have much of a goal.

She was dressed in a rainbow-striped jumper that looked as if it had been crocheted for a gorilla by a gorilla.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.

a birthmark the shape of Africa.

You have an eye," Miss Gillies told her. I have two, she thought.)

Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn't really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree.

Jackson was surprised she didn't have "Up for It" tattooed on her forehead.

You couldn't necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?) Eva

Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover's lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie's mother's lungs, organs that seemed to have more character than their owner.

People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.' Nigel

You can try things on if you want," Izzie said carelessly. "Although you're rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite." Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

If you were to ask me what the book is about (which is the most loathsome question you could ask—why bother to write the thing if you then have to explain it? It is what it is) and if I were forced to answer, I would say, "It's about things.

There are more and more visibly weird and freaky people in the world these days, and it's high time we stop carrying forward the junior high school dynamic of excluding them all from our lives or worse . . . nailing them to some cross.

Are you breaking some either/or cultural law, just by being who you are? If so, you're not alone.

It's healthier for your soul to live outside and above a degraded moral code than within and beneath one.