Quotes About Conformity

Aunt Wellington, of whom Valancy stood in abject awe, would tell her about Olive's new chiffon dress and Cecil's last devoted letter. Valancy would have to look as pleased and interested as if the dress and letter had been hers or else Aunt Wellington would be offended. And Valancy had long ago decided that she would rather offend God than Aunt Wellington, because God might forgive her but Aunt Wellington never would.

Freedom!' Mrs. Lynde sniffed. 'Freedom! Don't talk like a Yankee, Anne.

We all enjoyed our turnovers except Sara Ray. She ate hers but she knew she should not have done so. Her mother did not approve of snacks between meals, or of jam turnovers at any time. Once, when Sara was in a brown study, I asked her what she was thinking of. I'm trying to think of something ma hasn't forbid, she answered with a sigh. We

The trouble with Mr. Howard is that he's a leetle TOO clever. He thinks that he's bound to live up to his cleverness, and that it's smarter to thrash out some new way of getting to heaven than to go by the old track the common, ignorant folks is travelling. But

I have an ideal Sunday in my mind. Only, I am such a coward that I cannot translate it into the real, but must drift on with the current of conventionality. But I would like to go away on Sunday morning to the heart of some great solemn wood and sit down among the ferns with only the companionship of the trees and the wood-winds echoing through the dim, moss-hung aisles like the strains of some vast cathedral anthem. And I would stay there for hours alone with nature and my own soul.

Oh, oh, it's not meself that do be knowing what the girls of today are coming to. Trying to make thimselves into min and not succading very well at that.

The sensible way, which he had pursued once or twice in his life, had always proved boring, usually within a few days.

He was just a husband and a salaried man. Choice didn't play any part in his life.

Followed rules, not dreams. Never again. -Margaret Hellerstein

Meus problemas começavam quando eu tentava me encaixar na vida de outra pessoa, ainda mais quando isso significava desistir de uma parte de mim no processo.

A Tita le encantaría ser una simple semilla, no tener que dar cuentas a nadie de lo que se estaba gestando en su interior, y poder mostrarle al mundo su vientre germinado sin exponerse al rechazo de la sociedad. Las semillas no tenían este tipo de problemas, sobre todo, no tenían madre a la que temer, ni miedo a que las enjuiciaran.

will never be called upon to enact: the mainstream is

When you live in a way that's too different from everyone else, you get grief about it. Is it fair? No, but it's still what happens.

Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all a disappointment. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this.

Mr. Freeman sighs. No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!

Dead girl walking" the boys say in the halls. "Tell us your secrets" the girls whisper, one toilet to another. I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

Everyone is born a freak, notes Hayley. Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. . . . Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly.

I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don't have anyone to sit with.

Mr. Freeman thinks I need to find my feelings. How can I not find them? They are chewing me alive like an infestation of thoughts, shame, mistakes. I squeeze my eyes shut. Jeans that fit, that's a good start. I have to stay away from the closet, go to all my classes. I will make myself normal. Forget the rest of it

I just do what I'm told. If I felt like talking, I would explain that she couldn't pay me enough to play on her basketball team. All that running? Sweating? Getting knocked around by genetic mutants? I don't think so.

I'm sure I was a huge disappointment. I'm not pretty or smart or athletic. I'm just like them—an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies.

I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of August watching bad cartoons. I didn't go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don't have anyone to sit with. I am Outcast.

A woman who plays by men's rules is a woman who ends up in a cage." "Or a coffin.

A puritan culture's conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else.