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"I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike 'identity', must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ('gay', 'black', 'Muslim', whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity."
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Exlpore more Individuality quotes
"Life is too short as we all know it to be. So why dare to spend it trying to live up to other people's worldly expectations of you?"
"The most interesting people are the unusual. No one writes about or discusses the average, the ordinary, or the common; they write about and discuss the weird, the mad and the different, so if you are one, even though the opinions of others are of no importance, you are, in their eyes, significant enough to notice and remember."
"I don't care a hang for any cat that hasn't stripes."
"A misfit is like the round peg that cannot fit into the square hole or the running river that just can't stay still."
"Society destroys your individuality, your soul."
"You're entirly bonkers but I'll tell you a secret all the best people are."
"In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold."
"He got why Eleanor tried so hard to look different. Sort of. It was because she was different - because she wasn't afraid to be."
"The world doesn't celebrate your similarity but your difference."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman
"For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence."
"Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain."
"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"
"I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are."
"Seems to me-' Lee said, feeling for the words, 'seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed...."
"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
"To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do... Don't you worry that John Faa's heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgement. Not under passion."
"Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all, it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction."
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