Quotes About Uniqueness

Thank goodness for all the things you are not, thank goodness you're not something someone forgot, and left all alone in some punkerish place, like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space.

We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone.

Individuality doesn't just mean individualism-standing alone. It means developing one's unique gifts, and being able to share them for the enjoyment of oneself and others.

Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes the responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety")

Friendship is possible with mice.

The little children of my brain may be weakly enough, and may be sadly in want of a helping hand to aid them in their first attempts at walking on the stage of this great world; but, at any rate, they are not borrowed children.

Only lunatics can be completely original

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.

We all see the world differently from each other; we all have unique vision.

Luster returned, wearing a stiff new straw hat with a colored band and carrying a cloth cap. The hat seemed to isolate Luster's skull, in the beholder's eye as a spotlight would, in all its individual planes and angles. So peculiarly individual was its shape that at first glance the hat appeared to be on the head of someone standing immediately behind Luster.

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young.

I had no idea that no one else would do it.

I'm allergic to Best Ofs, canon of all sorts, rankings, comparison. I love the bottomless Borgesian library.

Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn't right. However odd things seem, mustn't it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one's own, and no one else's?

We have to face it at last. We're not all human.