Quotes About Individuality

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.

It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.

It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash.

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on.

Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.

Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

the first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone.

I don't think I'm any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn't had her mind fucked up by male religion.

Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person's, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.

The whole notion of coolness was puerile.

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?

They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.

No existe nadie cuya personalidad real nos guste hasta la última partícula. Por eso, un mundo donde todo consiste en gustar es en última instancia una mentira. Pero sí existe la persona de cuya personalidad real uno ama hasta la última partícula. Y por eso el amor representa tal amenaza existencial para el orden del tecnoconsumismo: Saca a la luz la mentira

gli parve di essere sbucato fuori non solo dagli acquitrini, ma anche dalla domenica, e di essere finito tra le dune di un ottavo, anonimo giorno della settimana che lui era l'unica persona al mondo a conoscere.

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he's lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them.

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone ~~Jonathan Franzen

The first thing reading teaches us is how to be alone

His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome.

So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans .