Quotes About Individuality

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

If you want pay, then just be gay.

I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.

because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.

Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?

Half-Christian, half-Jewish, a 'cathjew nut'

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,' Czes?aw Mi?osz once said.)

I'm the caring type also. I care aggressively. That's just who I am.

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it?

nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil;

I've got tattoos, I'm subculture. Some kind of post-teen bag lady, that's me.

You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive.

For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between

the posture than the results. This language thing is part of that. Excuse me: if you clean up the language too much you kill it. Dirt is freedom. You have to leave a little dirt. Cleansing? I don't like the sound of that.

if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

we live in an age in which we are urged to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to crush our own multidimensionality into the straitjacket of a one-dimensional national, ethnic, tribal, or religious identity. This, I have come to think, may be the evil from which flow all the other evils of our time.

You see, captain,  here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less.  But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.

he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room...