Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

I refused to conform to an image that a lot of people thought a president's brother should adopt.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

I don't believe in societal restrictions. It wasn't a choice - conformity simply never occurred to me.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

I can't stay within the constructs of societal expectations.

Only dead fish swim with the stream all of the time.

Society wants to put us in a box and say, OK, you do this and you do that and you do this, and I'm like, no, I like this, I like that.

If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox way, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.They will find away to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.

Never was a cornflake girl; Thought it was a good solution: hanging with the raisin girls.

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples of me? They are snobs. Frightful snobs I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak, because I'm myself!

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is. I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

There is a certain expectation of girls to eventually grow up and behave and fall in line. I've always bucked against that.

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

The fact that we were encouraged to follow our conscience and not to follow the crowds - that's something I really miss. On the other hand, there were things that drove me nuts in the '60s. There was an aspect of the hippie movement that everyone is an artist, which is lethal.

People don't know how to be outrageous anymore.