Quotes About Individuality

If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.

I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

You can't change the music of your soul. —In Esquire, 1967

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. There

Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities.

How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hop toads behind me are silent. I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. (20)

I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

I have an insidious conviction that between the onset of puberty and the age of thirty, people, like the hypothetical painting in the desert, do no exist without someone looking at them. I didn't. After thirty, I suppose we become a corporeal composite of what all of our viewers have witnessed, a kind of community gelatin.

If you need a helping hand, you can find one at the end of your arm.

Most people our brought up to believe they are as good as the person next to them, I was told I was better.

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.

Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.

Thinking about myself as a crazy, independent old woman made me feel almost happy.

Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.

You're different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they're invisible to us. They're natural, like breathing. But they're visible to you.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

Perfume should tell a story – the story of who you are, who you might be, perhaps even of who you fear becoming . . . all of these things are possible. It's a very intimate element of a woman, just like her signature or the sound of her voice. And it conveys feelings and states of being that have no name, no language. Its very ambiguity makes it truer than words because, unlike words, it can't be manipulated or misunderstood.

If you cannot fit into the mould, then you must step out of it

Perfume should tell a story – the story of who you are, who you might be, perhaps even of who you fear becoming…

this fundamental effort to get your bearings, this paradox pressed upon teenagers of distinguishing yourself from everyone in the world while taking care not to be different from anyone—

I'll say whatever I want. I'm not a book. You can't burn me!