Quotes About Conformity

You can't live someone else's expectations in life. It's a recipe for disaster.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

I had found that universities were no different from any other large organisation; the same timid conformity, the same stifling bureaucracy, was equally present in those supposed temples of creative thought and free expression as in the most faceless corporation.

At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.

I think it was the institution...I was trying to master it.

Someone is watching you. Or, someone is probably watching you. Or, you feel like someone's watching you. So you follow the rules whether someone's watching you or not.

Noel shook his head. "You think better of this scene than I do, Ruby. Don't you see how fake those girls are? Let it go. Have a laugh about it when you're older. Forget that junk." I wanted to believe him, to skip off to some punk-rock hangout and develop ironic distance and start over in a universe where it didn't matter what any of these people thought about me. But I couldn't. I just loved them.

I grew up with very normal, stable people," Brooke continued. "We acted normal all day long in my family. So normal I wanted to stab my eyes out. So I'm like an expert. And you? You are not normal. You should think about getting help for it, is what I'm saying.

It is not glamorous that I can't drive a car. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers. However, I am not immune to the feeling of being viewed as a mystery, as a Sinclair, as part of a privileged clan of special people, and as part of a magical, important narrative, just because I am part of this clan. My mother is not immune to it, either. This is who we have been brought up to be. Sinclairs. Sinclairs.

They want you to be small and silent. Good was just another word for don't fight back.

They do sometimes go crazy, these people, because the world is telling them not to want the things they want. it can seem saner to give up - but then one goes insane from giving up.

Her veins were never open. He heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted in puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost.

Club members refuse to abide by certain unwritten rules, and they make people aware of the existence of those rules by breaking them in public situations.

You don't try to be anyone else and that is a very hard thing in this world. It may seem unimportant right now when fitting in would be so much easier. But later you'll see. Being who you are is everything.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

Of the many things Lucy was noticing today, not the least remarkable was this: this ghoulish fashion in which respectable people will nibble after blood.

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....

Indoors was his place and there he'd moulder, a respectable pillar of society who has never had the chance to misbehave.

Maurice hated cricket. It demanded a snickety neatness he could not supply.

Against my will I have become normal.

Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

Durham no podía esperar. La gente los rodeaba, pero con ojos que se habían vuelto intensamente azules murmuró: —Que te amo. Maurice se escandalizó, se horrorizó. Se estremeció hasta las raíces de su alma burguesa, y exclamó:"¡Oh, maldición!" Las palabras, los gestos, surgían de él antes de que pudiera evitarlo.

By these days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him; he would have yearned for trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills against which he might measure his body. Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?

Why? Why were most big things unladylike?