Quotes About Conformity

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

I have never gotten into the label thing.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

There are old-money Asians that would never be caught dead with a Chanel handbag or sporting anything that has a label it.

I think growing up, people want to put you in a box and label you quite often, just because it's kind of easier, I guess.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

Labels are limiting, and I don't like them.

I hate labels.

So she fell into a black silence, she who had not been entitled to choose which home, which life. Who had gone out in a buggy a few times with a man of an age to be her father, ... agreed to marry. Who had accepted, not chosen. Because she was not a man.

Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep.

Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, then live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.

Churches crack me up. They're like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe that not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up alters, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that'd make a coven of witches not look OCD.

The house was decorated in unrelieved white and black. The people were, too. If it were up to me, I would carry a great big paintbrush around with me all the time, splashing color everywhere, decorating the world with peach and mauve, pink and lavender, orange and aquamarine. These folks seemed to think leeching the world of all color was cool. I decided they all must be deeply depressed.

Ritual numbs the brain. Repetition is grass for sheep.

People were not supposed to be getting married when she couldn't and people were not supposed to be hooking up when she wasn't.

This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded "mean," and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)

I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it's OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink.

I always have a problem liking things I'm told I should like.

Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were 'natural'.

Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.

What is freedom?" he asked bitterly, "and who is truly free? We are all bound by what we are, and where we come from." "Maybe," I said slowly as I considered the turn my life had taken, the lies I had been told, "because we do not look farther than where we have been told to look. Perhaps it would all be different if we weren't afraid of what we are. Or what we might become.

Yeterince erkeksi ya da kad?ns? olmamak, do?al yap?ya ayk?r? dü?mek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kad?n ya da erkek olarark do?du?umuz için, cinsel ki?ili?imizi yitirirsek yok olaca??m?z gibi bir dü?ünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.

She is no one, because she lacks any trait that might render her visible: beauty, money, conformity.

Yeterince erkeksi ya da kad?ns? olmamak, do?al yap?ya ayk?r? dü?mek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kad?n ya da erkek olarak do?du?umuz için, cinsel ki?ili?imizi yitirirsek yok olaca??m?z gibi bir dü?ünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.