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"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."
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"A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."
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Personal Development
"I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists."
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Personal Development
"Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
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
"Who was I fooling, telling my heart to quiet its beautiful song so I could march in the parade of conformity? My biggest fool was me."
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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
"Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs."
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Personal Development
"There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence."
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Personal Development
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
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Personal Development
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"Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them... You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring."
Society
"I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said."This sentence I'm reading is terrific."
Reading
"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
Personal
"We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle."
Family
"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."
Critique
"If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible."
Defiance
"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that."
Cities
"I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting."
Ego
"He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement."
Observation
"I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas."
Belief
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