Quotes About Individuality

A cada uno su pena, pero a todos la alegria

You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him.

Era este hombre muy estirado y relamido, y la gente estirada y relamida suele vivir habitualmente en un mundo tan reducido que cualquier cosa violenta e inusitada les puede sacar brusca y completamente de él; por ello, esta clase de gente suele desconfiar instintivamente de todo lo que represente una cierta originalidad.

He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

Save his own soul he hath no star.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

You can't expect to live in the world like the world's your private myth.

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you. Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein's thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space. What does that all make? Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up. What? What does it all make? Daniel says. It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us.

The still-alives. They were all crazy.

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

As he said it Mark, belted in in the back seat, had watched the holy water glint inside the plastic bubble next to the Virgin Mary and had wondered if the holy water was selective too, and if that's what God was these days, and whether everybody now simply had a private god who sanctioned his or her own choices

Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn't need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

It's funny to be sitting on such an uncommunal communal chair.

I really like you better aimless and lost among people, a little crazy, oddball, not looking like yourself. So that I don't know you at all and the nearer I get to you the more you separate yourself from me-- I get dizzy trying to follow you and I have to work really hard-- and that's what I want!

Maeniel felt this was why all the great sages never wrote anything down. In the final analysis, scriptures are futile things, dependent as they are on the intentions of the interpreter. All too often too literal a mind can lead human students into strange follies. Sometimes it is better to allow the searchers to try to plumb the depths of the great mystery on their own and accept that not every one of those taking the road will see the same end.

A woman need a man to claim, even if it's a dead one.

He say, 'You can be somebody if you want.' How the shit he don't know I'm somebody right now? He think he somebody and I'm not.

But as I grew up, I felt the tension one surely must feel when being simultaneously taught the importance of a specific dogma and the importance of freedom from dogma.

We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too, But very human beings, human just as much as you. It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.

everyone had specialties when it came to others.

She read Housekeeping, which Heidi loved because the odd people were the good people; The Handmaid's Tale, which she understood was terrifying even if the details were fuzzy; Giovanni's Room, which made her sigh, because people were so stubborn; The Professor's House, which she loved for the spooky dress form and Tom's trip to the old Southwest; and Anywhere But Here, which was Maud's favorite, because it starred a girl.