Quotes About Individuality

At the beginning he'd thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. 27

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face.

Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.

Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage

I am ALONE AND PEACEFUL and that combination is so unusual, it's like meeting someone for the first time.

I noticed one with short, raven-colored hair who looked not unlike myself (we are interchangeable--the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty).

He thought: I'm a guy who wears boots like this. It was the first thing he knew about himself.

eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

Knowing all of this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know it's happened?

As a model, of course, I'd carried my face like a sign, holding it out a foot or so in front of me—not out of pride or vanity, God knew; those had been stamped out long ago, or at any rate, disjoined from my physical appearance. No, out of sheer practicality: here's what I am. Calling card, handshake, précis, call it what you like; it was what I had to offer to the world where I had spent my life.

We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backwards to resemble everyone else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

Barbara looked alarmed. "You mean you could have decided to be anybody?" "Not anybody, but the person I became. I think we are who we are because consciously, or unconsciously, we choose ourselves.

Sorry," I said. "They're great, but you know. The world doesn't revolve around breasts." "Listen to you!" Curly shouted. "Of course the world revolves around breasts! What else would it revolve around?

The line between male and female turns out to be rather fine. Although we imagine our genders as firm and fixed, in fact they are as malleable as a sand castle.

As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves. pg 197

I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

Anybody can buy. It takes an artist to shop.

It makes me wonder just how many supposedly brave people in the world are just men and women trying to imitate someone more courageous than themselves.

The more we feel compelled to keep explaining ourselves, the less like others we become.

That's what I learned. Everybody's black and blue, somewhere. I never met anybody who wasn't." "Not like me." "No," said Shannon. "Everybody gets broken all their own way." She smiled bitterly. "That's what makes you, you: the pieces you're smashed into aren't like anybody else's. They're all yours.

I wasn't a woman who stayed tiny like I thought I would. I definitely gave myself the freedom to eat what I wanted.

Sometimes you stop seeing what the person is to the world. You only see what the person is to you.