Quotes About Nonconformity

My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.

Live and let live is Frances's motto. "Life is short," she likes to say. "You only get one, and if you waste it worrying about what other people think

Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.

One's just supposed to conform. I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

She appreciated the fact that the wolf did not caper, bow down, yelp, or slaver on her, in the slavish and inconsiderate way of dogs. The wolf was no whore for man's approval. He fed himself.

Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant.

This building doesn't just break the rules, Langdon thought. It ignores them completely.

You don't say," Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.

I danced with too many squares tonight. Let's melt 'em all down.

You're mad, bonkers, off your head! But I'll tell you a secret: all the best people are.

I said school starts tomorrow. I didn't say I was going to be there.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

I recognize no empire of this present age.

I've had watermelon hair where I had pink with green tips. From the age of 13 to about 19 or 20, I never had my real hair color.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this—that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn't suit her views.

She was unlike most girls of her age, in this--that she had ideas of her own.

Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!

rules were not made for geniuses;

In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies.

What do you mean do I go around with narcotics signing petitions painting slop writing books full of dirty words with a beard?

She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care

beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure.