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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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"Conformity keeps us closed minded."
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Personal Development
"A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I enjoy being a lemming,we line up to do everything together."
Author Name
Personal Development
"People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."
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Personal Development
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"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
Life
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
Work
"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."
People
"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
Experience
"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
Brevity
"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."
Destruction
"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."
Environment
"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
Fate
"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."
Youth
"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
Time
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