Quotes About Individuality

People talk of life's storms as if they are universal experiences. But they're not. Some people hear thunder while others touch lightning.

He didn't understand that one person's love is better than a thousand people's approval.

college education does not make one wise; it just fills your head with others' voices.

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

If guys don't respect themselves, they don't respect other people. That's times and personalities. And all of them are not that way. But it don't take but one or two to screw up the whole crowd.

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

the conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors]...to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.

There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared.

If I were a man, I'd definitely sleep with myself. In other words, if you tell me to go fuck myself, I take it as a compliment.—581 Ways To Kill Your Boss

Why be normal? What's the point?

What a wonderful person I am!

I am the homosexual you cannot be proud of

Nineteenth-century nationalism established what we might call the modern ground-rule for having an identity. You have the strongest identity when you aren't aware you 'have' it; you just are it. That is, you are most yourself when you are least aware of it

I want to tell you this story without having to be in it

To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself.

His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

It's no big deal for us to be out of each other's company for a couple of days. We've done it before. We're friends and lovers, not Siamese twins.

Many people... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.

The important thing is to recognize that when they want to do something on their own, it's not a rejection of you, it's simply an affirmation of who they are. It's their way of touching base and staying happy and if you don't let them do it, you'll lose the person you love.

You know that part of your writing that you question, —that's weird and doesn't fit neatly into a genre or mold?Write more of that. Please.

I am not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I'm here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times.

I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit.

Alles ist nach seiner Art: an ihr wirst du nichts ändern