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"Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything."
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"The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity."
"Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade."
"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."
"Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people."
"Put too many one-size-fits-all jackets on Americans and the place explodes."
"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."
"Fashion condemns us to many follies the greatest is to make oneself its slave."
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
"Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties."
"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
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