Quotes About Nonconformity

Everybody likes outlaws. Everybody wants to look at them, like they are in the zoo.

I was not like other kids, as my mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell Photoplay, too. To their great admiration, I was sure.

Right, I'll bet he's another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt.

But she is not those people; she is her odd self. The kiln has been fired; she is a person persnickety about keeping her house clean but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain; she will never be an athlete or a mathematician or a skinny person or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.

For better or for worse, my dad taught me that the best place to pitch a tent will always be the spot marked NO CAMPING.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an urban Thoreau) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

And this commitment of ours—consciously devoid of official commitment—felt miraculous in its liberation.

we can't just follow Paris for the sake of Paris.

I did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn't seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn't

don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

I wish somebody had told them all to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven's sake, and ignore the outcome.

The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don't need to follow it, no matter what they say.

did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn't seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn't believe that it made me bad.

I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read

I do not make the rules [. . .] This annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them

Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn't need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

I don't want to be pinned down to any position. My position is the lack of a position, but of course you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk you spoil the whole game-Marcel Duchamp

My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances

We hate the ones who are spontaneously different, as if what they loved accused us of unhappiness.

I want to be lawless; I want to be alone.

And for an insane moment she thought, this is no different from normality, just women existing and surviving, this is what happens to women who don't fit into a world created by men.

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 Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.