Quotes About Conformity

The absolutely highest stage of intercourse with God is the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the New Testament Church, when man's individuality is not superseded nor suppressed, but transformed, and thus conformed to Him in spiritual fellowship.

I knew I must do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

But Sally didn't have the heart to fight back. She wore dark clothes and tried not to be noticed. She pretended she wasn't smart and never raised her hand in class. She disguised her own nature so well that after a while she grew uncertain of her own abilities.

They didn't understand why a brave, independent woman had been so brutally treated. Many of them began to wonder why they themselves often feigned opinions rather than speak their minds, no matter how clever they were, for fear they'd be thought of as difficult.

Many of them began to wonder why they themselves often feigned opinions rather than speak their minds, no matter how clever they were, for fear they'd be thought of as difficult.

Once upon a time, before the whole world changed, it was possible to run away from home, disguise who you were, and fit into polite society

I'll pretend to be who they want me to be.' He grinned then, and she saw his youth. 'But it won't work. In the end I'll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.

In truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

Throughout the typing pool all the girls began to do the same.

It's just that when we were younger we were not free enough to live our lives the way we really were.

individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves

Now there were grown men and women who would try to look like teen-agers until

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.

I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I

Do not be like cows grazing watching the butcher.

When Pa tell you to do something, you do it, he say. When he say not to, you don't. You don't do what he say, he beat you. Sometime beat me anyhow, I say, whether I do what he say or not. That's right, say Harpo. But not Sofia. She do what she want, don't pay me no mind at all. I try to beat her, she black my eyes. Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo.

That she had seen the magazines we receive from home and that it was very clear to her that black people did not truly admire blackskinned black people like herself, and especially did not admire blackskinned black women. They bleach their faces, she said. They fry their hair. They try to look naked.

It ain't bad, said Shug. But I just feel funny living in a square. If I was square, then I could take it better, she said.

none of her innate curiosity about and interest in life had ebbed. She also in no way subscribed to the rules and regulations of a society that suppressed almost all spontaneous signs of joy, and whose insistence on conformity, she had noticed, made life so lacking in vibrancy for all concerned. At the moment she realized any human being might die for almost any reason at any given instant, she also understood that, accepting this fact, she could be free.

What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.

Sanity - a trick of agreement

Slaves of Plastic! Leather-shoe chino-pants prisoners! Haircut junkies! Dacron-shiffers!

ONE OF THE REASONS I'm good at being a ghostwriter is that I've been a chameleon for as long as I can remember. I become whatever people want me to be. It's almost effortless now—sussing out what others want or need and then transforming. Who am I, truly? I have no idea.