Quotes About Conformity

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guild is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

Soldiers and children do as they're told. Children grow out of it, but soldiers just die.

I shudder to think. I might wear lace collars and laugh flower petals and pearls. People might try to pat me. I see them think it. My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex- Must touch-and I've found that since you can't electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer's eyes.

Anyone who would wear all white like that clearly has issues

And others were born to... what? To stand in the crowd and do nothing, try nothing, say nothing, and accept every serving of bitter nothing as their due?

The game is pretending. It's going through the motions of life. But it's not living. The game is for people who want rules because they're afraid to believe anything everyone else doesn't already believe. They're all scared to leave the street where they live and do something with their lives. the game is for people who want to be told what to do. Okay. Good for them, if that's what they want.

This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian's a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…" "Thanks," Simon said. "I'm glad to be classed with the criminal element.

How is Ty? There is nothing wrong with Ty, but he is different, and the Clave hates all that is different. They will try to punish him, for being who he is. They would punish a star for burning.

Everyone I looked at, their whole lives, did exactly what they were supposed to do without even questioning it, without even wondering if they could do something different.

What puzzled me was why I seemed to be so troubled by all these irregularities and exceptions to major rules while others blithely marched ahead.

The problem with a small town is that when you don't buy into the powers that be there are very few other choices. It's like a play where there is only a "virtuous" lead, a villain, and bit players. Better to be the villain because you're not duped into believing you're in more than a play, and at least your name goes on the program.

As one of my sons always says, "normal" is just a setting on a washing machine.)

It's a choice between getting the crap beaten out of you for being exactly what you are, or avoiding the beating by selling out and pretending you're not, which is like pretending there's something wrong with what you are. I'm not sure which is worse.

We did exactly what we were supposed to do." "Us?" he asked. "Yes. Us. We did exactly what our parents taught us. We got married in the church, and we tried to have a bunch of kids. We lived the life everybody told us was right. And now look at us. Tina is gone. We're apart. Why did we do just what we were supposed to do if it wasn't even going to make us happy?

How do you gauge normal? To do so, you'd have to know how everybody else lives.

people want you to do what they think

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Marya Morevna! Don't you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention!

all children are required to attend School, which is like a party to which everyone forgot to bring punch, or hats, or fiddles, and none of the games have good prizes.