Quotes About Self-expression

All of which is to say: You do not need a permission slip from the principal's office to live a creative life. Or if you do worry that you need a permission slip—THERE, I just gave it to you. I

that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don't need to follow it, no matter what they say.

it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection

I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life–so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one.

Perhaps creativity's greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are.

No more verbal tap-dancing for pennies of affirmation.

Live your life as you wish, my peach, but don't let it bitch up the bloody show.

You do not need anyone's permission to live a creative life

pareció que no hacía daño a nadie. Y, en todo caso, en la vida de una mujer llega un momento en que se cansa de sentirse culpable todo el rato. A partir de ese momento, es libre de convertirse en quien de verdad es.

It hardly mattered. She was tired of waiting for him to acknowledge who he was. Tired of donning a false mask of gaiety when she was so much more—felt so much more—beneath. No one had ever noticed her mask. No one but him. If he couldn't or wouldn't make the first move, then damn it, she would.

She did not want to be Bilong's mother, or her grandmother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The

Its best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this...a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness.

But we found San Salvatore, said Mrs. Arbuthnot, and it is rather silly that Mrs. Fisher should behave as if it belonged only to her. What is rather silly, said Mrs. Wilkins with much serenity, is to mind. I can't see the least point in being in authority at the price of one's liberty.

I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, call when I feel like it, throw tantrums in Bloomingdale's if I feel like it and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself: that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy...

Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can't be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.

Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.

Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.

I do not make the rules [. . .] This annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them

My autism is part of who I am, not all of who I am.

I'm an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression.

In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.

If I won't be myself, who will?