Quotes About Individuality

You patronize me like some little woman with no mind to call her own. I speak with heart devoid of fear to those with wit to understand, and you can praise me or condemn me as you like, it's all the same to me.

It is absurd to ape our betters.

That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

You're the perfect girl', he said, rubbing his chin. 'You expect nothing.

It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples.

One could not spend one's life in the imaginings of another life.

We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.

part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half–girl Mowgli, half–woman Thoreau.

I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls.

We are all locked in rooms in different ways, and part of growing up is finding different kinds of keys, and meeting the people who will help free you.

I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

An old man with overalls walked by; I don't think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.

It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples.

It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.

The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else. was to be indifferent to that difference.

freedom. But the two strands, though intertwined, must remain separate in order for the structure of freedom to

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can inhibit us from observing others; we become taken up with adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, we have to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another's approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person's views deserve to be listened to.