Quotes About Individuality

A little self-hatred keeps a person interesting

We must see ourselves in community with all other people at local, national and global levels. While this may seem superficially easy, it is actually not. Western culture, now globally dominant, has systematically trained us to think and act as though we are separate individuals, often in competition with each other for scarce resources of one sort or another, primarily money, which has be-come the perceived means to all we want and need in life.

How much of who I am is defined by the world around me, and how much is something more innate?

If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.

Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?

The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls--their looks, their clothes, their social life--do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.

I don't want anybody treating me as a "person" rather than as a woman. Our sexual differences are the terms of our life, and to obscure them in any way is to weaken the very fabric of life itself. When they are lost, we are lost.

Señor Jaime," said little Moquetin, a bright-eyed imp of six, "why is it that your face is always red?" Jim countered, "Why is it that your face is always brown?" "Because it is much prettier that way," was the unexpected reply.

you are worthy and lovable, just as you are, on your own.

loss counts more than another. It is your loss that counts for you. It is your loss that affects you. Your loss is deep and deserves

If you found something aesthetically displeasing, like Maple Sugar Estates, then the chances were that you would find it also morally repugnant—repugnant if for no other reason than because it justified making everything the same, taking life and dragging it to its lowest common denominator.

Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?

I wasn't sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn't weaned from that yet; I wasn't finished being with him in the only way I had left.

wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

She is her odd self. The kiln has been fired. She is a person persnickity about keeping her house clean, but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain. She will never be an athlete, or a mathematician, or a skinny person, or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.

All these small things are the glue that keeps you bound to your own life. They are the things that make you you. And in that respect, they are not little at all. They are huge. They are grand.

Everybody always forgets that you die the way you live. She will keep on being herself until the end.

She picked out a pleasing mismatch of dishes from various thrift stores. "They speak the same language," Maddy said, about the dishes. "But they're not all saying the same thing.

every person was like a box of magic:

I was not like other kids, as my mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell Photoplay, too. To their great admiration, I was sure.

There were no formulas to account for the idiosyncratic yearnings of a human heart, no ways to extract from someone feelings that lived as matter-of-factly as blood and bones inside of him. In the end, Griffin thought, we are only who we are.

woman is most beautiful when she is herself. The Japanese call it a beauty with 'inner implications.' It's not a show-off kind of thing, some peacock display of clothes and makeup and demeanor. It's quiet. Subtle. And here's the most interesting thing: Shibui relies on the ones looking at a person or an object to make something for themselves out

Right, I'll bet he's another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt.

beret sleeves.