Sherman Alexie Quotes

We must never lose our individuality.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

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

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality.

I don't want to be someone else.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

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.

Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, 'Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.' Nobody ever tells you, 'Just be yourself' - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

If I'd wanted to be an individual, I'd have taken up tennis.

Do not resemble me-Never be like a musk melon Cut in two identical halves.

People are expecting me to be a certain way all the time. It's not like if I come in here with a totally different personality and right before the camera starts they see this new character. It confuses everything. Life has a consensus reality to it and if you use that to your advantage it makes it much easier.

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

I do not want to work to correspond to an image.

I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it.

I'm a different person. I don't want to be titled as Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain's daughter. I want to be thought of as Frances Cobain.

Life is very, very short, and you can choose to live it how you want. You can choose to dumb yourself down and not express yourself just so you can fit in, just so people won't dislike you.

Every producer I have met has asked me to change my hair. I have always said 'No.' I finally change it for me... and now everyone in the business is like, 'You have to go back to having brown hair.'

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

Each man must have his "I"; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.