Richard Brautigan Quotes

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

While I was doing stand-up, I thought I knew for sure that success meant getting everyone to like me. So I became whoever I thought people wanted me to be. I'd say yes when I wanted to say no, and I even wore a few dresses.

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.

I caved in to what people wanted me to do. I thought that they weren't going to like me if I didn't.

A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away.

You don't want to disappoint anybody, but you know, you lose your voice by trying to please everyone.

When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'

Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.

You can lose who you are so easily when you're being so many things to so many different people.

I know that there's people that have expectations of me, and I'm a people pleaser, so I want them to be happy.

I've always been looking for other people's approval.

This is the kind of world I was born in, one in which I had only one reason for existence: pleasing others.

Being a nice girl from the Mid-West, my inclination is always to give in and say yes because I want people to like me.

It is a challenge trying not to give in to pleasing other people.

I don't feel the breath of a thousand people over my shoulder.

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

The world calls me conceited. The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own party to that of others.

There are two ways to make a person feel homeless—one is to destroy his home and the other is to make his home look and feel like everybody else’s home.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Kids are the most conventional people in the world. It is more important than anything else for them to conform, and I was a kind of oddball. I was driven into being independent. I was very, very unhappy.

When I was young, I just tried to please everybody.

As girls grow up and download what it means to be a culturally acceptable 'good girl,' they learn to please others at the expense of themselves. They worry about protecting relationships - and what people think of them - at all costs.

I spent so long trying to be other people, and it made me really deeply unhappy.

I was a very shy kid and both my best friend and my sister went to Waterloo, and I just thought no I can't, I can't go there because I'll just hang on to them and no one will even know who the heck I am and that's no way to go through life.

If you want to fit in, you try to mirror whatever anyone wants from you.