Quotes About Rebellion

I don't care about being a literary personality - that doesn't appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn't appeal to me. I actually don't feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, 'Whatever.'

It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.

He'd just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted

As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with out fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.

A lot of us are like that—I'm like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.

drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders;

long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Por fin se había liberado de las ataduras, emancipado del mundo opresivo formado por sus padres y los que eran iguales que ellos, un mundo hecho de abstracciones, seguridad y bienestar material, un mundo en el que sentía como una dolorosa amputación la ausencia del latir puro y salvaje de la existencia. Al

He was alone," as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. "He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested

It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere." So long as the resistance was informed by fact and executed with integrity, Jefferson believed, all would be well.

Don't ever try to be normal because it's the first symptom of a terminal disease. As soon as you feel the need to be normal coming on, get the antidote. ... Just make sure you're living your life; don't let normal pretend to be you.

You people sit in your yamen [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. `You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!

What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them.

The whole notion of coolness was puerile.

A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight, she said. If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.

That this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved.

Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority.

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation.