Quotes About Individuality

if they told their own stories, our whole society could fall apart. They have to think it's nothing. But—

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances

People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by-the-way?

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

Beauvoir was untouched by the criticisms; her diary was a record of one consciousness, her own: "This is what I saw and how I saw it. I have not tried to say more.

For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story.

our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we've been told to experience and what we've been told we have to do, both worry and distress me. I don't want to live in someone else's dream.

I am the only language I can understand.

I'm the one who has no small feelings

We hate the ones who are spontaneously different, as if what they loved accused us of unhappiness.

Another way to say it: we are each the whole thing, and I merge with you when I wish.

I don't want to speak this language that doesn't know me.

But I've always been a poet, that's all, no sex or race, no age or face. Can Eternity strip me of it? That's only another word. I'm inside myself, and inside it.

for everything I am is my mind, that never leaves me.

I already have no point of view except that of the fallen. I have no individuality, because I'm a deadened thing.

Of course I'm not being objective it was my life As a matter of fact I feel positively defiant about

Oh but I need my lone self!

We are the ones there are, and will always be.

Everything I think's private. I don't want the dead or telepaths to hear my mind.

I have to cover up a lot of parts of me. Everyone does.

I don't like other people's fake sentimentality; I don't like their politics, or their religion. It smothers me.