Quotes About Individuality

figuring out who you are is the whole part of the human exprience

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [ Commencement Speech ; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

A finished person is a boring person.

Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

She just didn't know who else to be other than the person she was right now,

Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Just be true to yourself, and listen as much as one is able to to other people whose opinions you respect and look up to but in the end it has to come from you. You can't really worry too much by looking to the left and the right about what the competition is doing or what other people in your field are doing. It has to be a true vision.

The most important distinction anyone can ever make in their life is between who they are as an individual and their connection with others.

For all the robots who question their programming.

The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.

Paladin had nothing to say to that, so he decided to pry. "What do you do?" "I make custom penises.

Is that how humans are raised? Autonomous?

Arendt's "totalitarian personality," the "completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.

I identified with both women. But Emma had a stronger message for the women I want to speak to now women who work. I wanted to tell them that choosing to work doesn't make them oddballs and isn't antisocial.

I was at a point where I was ready to say I am what I am because of what I am and if you like me I'm grateful, and if you don't, what am I going to do about it?

My grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright wore a red sash on his wedding night. That is glamour!

I]f you adapted too much in order to deal with them, you ran the risk of forgetting who you were and you could end up being neither and nothing.

He just hoped Meg leading the way didn't mean all the blood prophets would do strange things to their hair.

Sometimes I ask lots of people the same question." His head hurt. "What do you do if you don't get the same answer?" "Think about it.

Why?" He stopped pacing and looked at her as if she'd just asked him to count every leaf on every tree in the Old Place. "Because... you're you.

I'm not cs747," she whispered defiantly as she shifted on her cot in order to lean back against the wall. "My name is Jean.

Don't absorb so much of what is human that you forget who you are. But if you must, do it for your own sake rather than for the benefit of the rest of us.