Lauren Oliver Quotes

I try to be as normal as I can.

I keep saying, 'Don't change. Be who you are,' but society is really strong in their opinions.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

I just want to be like other people that are normal.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

I don't have any desire to rebel and be something totally different from what I am.

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them, They sing while you slave and I just get bored

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could've happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was 'normal'".

To be like other people is to be unlike ourselves.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

If you act weird, people are going to treat you weird, but if you're just yourself, people respond to that.

It's lame to say that I'm a normal girl, but I think I am.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

I'm like, 'Yeah, I could afford braces, but why should I change myself to be what everybody else wants me to be when I'm OK with who I am and I'm happy with who I am?'

I don't like to be different; I would like to be the same.

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.

When I was in school, I got there on the first day and everyone had long, blonde, straight hair, and I had short, dark, curly hair. I immediately felt I didn't fit in and started growing my hair. But I've learned that I'm only happy when I am truly me and feel comfortable and confident in myself.