Connie Willis Quotes

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

I think it's possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.

I don't know what I want, but I do know that I don't want the usual stuff, the cliched stuff is just too mind-numbing. They sell, I know, but it makes me sad to know that.

I haven't got a problem with sheeple calling me crazy. What's sane? What is crazy?

Just because everybody else does something isn't a good enough reason to do anything.

I hate everything that is driven by fashion.

The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.

This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life — wait a second — you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.

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.

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.

My whole life is a contradiction on purpose - to make you think. I think people have forgetten how to have their own opinions. They're always waiting for someone to tell them what to do and what to wear - it's so boring.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different, I'd rather be completely #$%^&^& mental.

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

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity's hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.

I use my dress to wipe up my drink, I care less and less what people think.

Anybody who French bashes just might as well wear a badge that says 'I am a follower! I don't think for myself and I have no idea what I'm talking about.' That would be a French basher.

There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

If I asked people to live as I live, they would kill me.