Kelley Armstrong Quotes

People will always put you in a box that they think you fit in, and it's up to you to not fall into it.

I have a fear of labels. If someone labels me, I have to respond - do I acknowledge it, reject it, deny it, live up to it, and defy it? Labels can affect your ability to be yourself. If you're not careful, like I wasn't when I was young, that can take a toll on you. You find yourself conforming to everyone else's ideas of who you are.

If you can't pigeon-hole yourself, who can you pigeon-hole?

I believe so many people live what I call that false identity they are living according to other people's expectations, associations, their experiences, the labels in life. And they buy into that.

Labels are for cans, not for people.

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

That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

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

I hate labels.

I don't like to get pigeonholed. I don't like it when people think they have you sewn up.

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

People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.

You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.

The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.

Most people are other people.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

People can portray me anyway they want because I don’t give a damn… But don’t you analyze me and don’t you tell me what I am until you get close enough to understand what I am. Then you can make an analysis of me. But don’t you dare do it until then.

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.

I don't want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do - not what we say we are.

It takes a lot of courage to be the same person on the outside that you are on the inside.

The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.

I've tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.

I'd like people to understand that I do have some personality.