Wednesday, April 29, 2009

"'I mean if he were a girl -- somebody in my dorm, for example -- he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so -- I don't know -- not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and -- sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.' She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand -- less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. 'I feel so funny,' she said. 'I think I'm going crazy. Maybe I'm already crazy.'"(Franny, J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey)
Is there any way not to conform?