being different Quotes

“All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one’s past is exactly like anyone else’s, no two people see alike.”

“A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor.”

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

“There’s nothing wrong with being different.”

“Now Gregor knew what all the fuss was about. To his eyes, Temp looked exactly like the other twenty roaches sitting around. How on Earth could Boots have picked him out of the crowd?”

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?”

“In this course, it is not ‘Who do I want to be in life?’ but ‘What is it that I want to accomplish in life?’ Setting aside selfish interest, it asks: What calling does it serve? What principles govern my choices? Do I want to be like everyone else or do I want to do something different?”

“I hear voices in my mind and you’re worried that you’re the freak,” he laughed.”

“I had known for a long time that the people about me used a method of communication different from mine; and even before I knew that a deaf child could be taught to speak, I was conscious of dissatisfaction with the means of communication I already possessed.”

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

“There are days when the close attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but soon I recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart.”

“I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they were all along, busy with living; they don’t talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day if entirely different; I am thoroughly foreign.”

“It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.”

“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete - that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

“If you ask enough people, you’ll find someone who will disagree with the majority and give those nervous about risk a way out.”

“She couldn’t imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn’t imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?”

“Not one of them is like another. Don’t ask us why. Go ask your mother.”

“Thinking all Silvers are evil is just as wrong as thinking all Reds are inferior…. What my people are doing to you and yours is wrong to the deepest levels of humanity. Oppressing you, trapping you in an endless cycle of poverty and death, just because we think you are different from us? That is not right. And as any student of history can tell you, it will end poorly.”

“By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child – except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact.”

“Look! . . . What a pity! A young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than his wife.”

“He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded. At his father’s urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games – football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit.”

“Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight.”

“Forgive me…for everything…I have done…A─ a wiser father…may have done differently. I am not…wise.”

“Channel your own authenticity, be the best damn version of yourself possible, and forget about the rest.”

“I realised, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafés were for everyone else.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner too. I come from a place that’s so different from here you would think you’d stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirt for decoration and the national pastime is having babies. People don’t look the same, talk the same, nothing. Half the time I have no idea what’s going on around me here.”

“I found myself living among an enclave of students where I was the only person of color. I was doing it again integrating a previously all-white residence house, even though I had other options.”

“It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.”

“The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well - in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.”

“So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.”

“So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn’t tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress.”

“As boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss. He is the cheese to my macaroni. And I know people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce, but—I guess normalcy isn’t really our style.”

“Sometimes people never even ask my name, like it’s not important or something. It is. My name is Melody.”

“So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn’t tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress.”

“Maybe I’m not so different from everyone else after all.”

“As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with ‘race.’ I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me ‘white,’ even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly. ‘Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You’re not the first.’”

“The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”

“I’ll be a great doctor with excellent bedside skills. I’ll be perfectly happy. But something about Natasha makes me think my life could be extraordinary.”

″ ‘I am disappointed.” Marilyn’s head snaps up. ‘l thought you were different.’ What she means is: I thought you were better than other men. I thought you wanted better than that. ”

“It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right. ”

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”

“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”

“Maybe I don’t like being different,” Meg said. “but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either.”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“She was not truly a cheerleader, but Stargirl dressed like one.”

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past “weird” and “strange” and “goofy.” Her ways knocked us off balance.”

“She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school. In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was . . .”

″She was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory. Unsafe. We were afraid to get too close.”

“Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before.”

“She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.”

″ I feel ... I have vegetables instead of ears, like large broccoli sticking out of my head. ”

“You don’t have to say anything. I know we’re different. We’re not the same.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved you.”

“All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people.”

″‘As boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss. He is the cheese to my macaroni. And I know people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce, but—I guess normalcy isn’t really our style.‘”

“Robin was a great kid. Smarter than her father at eight years old. She liked the oddest things. Like the instructions for a toy more than the toy itself. The credits of a movie instead of the movie. The way something was written. An expression on my face.”

“It is beyond belief what Bojangles does, which is why Elisa is ashamed to feel a burst of ego: She could have kept pace with him better than Shirley Temple, if only the world into which she’d been born had been wholly different.”

“Sorry, Hannah. For someone with your brains, it will be a waste of time. You’ve just got to squeeze what you can out of it and wait for college. Then you can show the world how awesome you are.”

“But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.”

“He turned toward my voice. ‘Am I well?’ His mocking tone was unmistakable. ‘Am I well? Why can’t you just talk like everyone else? Why can’t you just say, ‘How you doin’? You doin’ good?‘”

“Perhaps I am pretentious in saying so, but I would like to think that I am not “many men,” and that I dinna necessarily place my behavior at the lowest common denominator.”

“I’ll never be like other people, but that’s alright because I’m a bear”

“Before Mr. Brown could answer he had climbed up and placed his right paw firmly on the bun. It was a very large bun, the biggest and stickiest Mr. Brown had been able to find, and in a matter of moments most of the inside found its way on to Paddington’s whiskers. People started to nudge each other and began staring in their direction. Mr. Brown wished he had chosen a plain, ordinary bun, but he wasn’t very experienced in the way of bears. He stirred his tea and looked out of the window, pretending he had tea with a bear on Paddington station every day of his life.”

“But not Ferdinand. When he got to the middle of the ring he saw the flowers in all the lovely ladies’ hair and he just sat down quietly and smelled.”

“And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. ”

“He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.”

“She always slept with her feet on the pillow and her head far down under the covers. ‘That’s the way they sleep in Guatemala,’ she explained. ‘And it’s the only right way to do it. This way, I can wiggle my toes while I’m sleeping, too.‘”

“At lunchtime in the school yard, to his friends he was still plain and ordinary, ‘Max’... Well, not quite ordinary. But then as Aaron said, ‘Everyone’s different in some way, aren’t they?’ ”

“Gracey’s my sister. I like her. She’s not like the rest of the girls in town. She don’t chase after all the boys and play that game like. She could catch them all right, don’t you worry. Gracey’s the fastest girl across the ground you’ve ever seen.”

“One night Elmer couldn’t sleep for thinking, and the think that he was thinking was that he was tired of being different.”

“Elmer was different. Elmer was patchwork. Elmer was yellow and orange and red and pink and purple and blue and green and black and white.”

Young Spider is different from other boys; he’s handicapped both mentally and physically. But he has a marvellous affinity with animals of every sort. A crowstarver is someone who scares crows away from the growing corn, and Spider is the best crowstarver there ever was; and in his understanding and love of all animals, even the croaks, as he calls them, he finds fullfilment.

The book focused on animals, follows the boy Spider, abandoned at birth, and different through life. His gift for befriending animals brings him joy & value in his small farming community. We get a glimpse of life in the English countryside during World War II.

“I missed Conan Doyle, he pined for his Keats We’re book lice fine mates despite different tastes.”

“Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you start school?”

“My family was something other, something not entirely human. Our power was feared, not respected.”