My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it's probably because your heart is talking.

She was an extraordinary person too! Would you believe it, she cut her hair short, and used to go about in men’s boots in bad weather

I can’t change the world, I can only change how I choose to live in it.

To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:Don't kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your gameAnd died, there's nothing in it.

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.

I'm not here to be small, to compare, to judge (myself or you), to fit in or to be perfect. I'm here to grow, to learn, to love, to be human.

If you're wonderful in any way somebody will fuck with you. Just like if you're horrible in any way they're gonna fuck with you. The world is for the average and the common. Those are the people who never hurt - they just fall asleep. The rest of us, we're The Walking Wounded.

I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity--to one's self.

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.