Top 40 Alexandra Robbins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality.”

— Alexandra Robbins

2. “The aging aren’t only the old; the aging are all of us.”

— Alexandra Robbins

3. “Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit.”

— Alexandra Robbins

4. “Conformity is not an admirable trait. Conformity is a copout. It threatens self-awareness. It can lead groups to enforce rigid and arbitrary rules.”

— Alexandra Robbins

5. “If schools celebrated student scientists the same way they celebrate student athletes, more students would be encouraged to pursue the subject. Instead, science is considered nerdy because schools help students to paint it that way.”

— Alexandra Robbins

6. “It’s not about what you’ve done; it’s how you’ve experienced whatever has happened to you. Matt Lawrence in The Overachievers.”

— Alexandra Robbins

7. “We live in the Age of Comparison. Too often, we deem our own achievements worthless if they fall short of others’ standards. Our best isn’t good enough if it’s not as good as someone else’s best.”

— Alexandra Robbins

8. “If teachers are uncomfortable at their own school, they will pass on their uncertainties or negative attitude to students.”

— Alexandra Robbins

9. “Social standing does not necessarily translate to social acceptance.”

— Alexandra Robbins

10. “In one survey, respondents listed Princeton as one of the country’s top ten law schools. The problem? Princeton doesn’t have a law school.”

— Alexandra Robbins

11. “Being an outsider doesn’t necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin.”

— Alexandra Robbins

12. “A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: “ ‘What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.”

— Alexandra Robbins

13. “Students usually don’t refer to themselves as nerds until someone else accuses them of being one.”

— Alexandra Robbins

14. “It was the fact that they tried so hard that doomed them.”

— Alexandra Robbins

15. “As a Minnesota agency nurse said, “We are not just bed-making, drink-serving, poop-wiping, medication-passing assistants. We are much more.”

— Alexandra Robbins

16. “Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.”

— Alexandra Robbins

17. “In the midst of a crowd, an individual’s layers of restraint peel away, revealing potentially barbaric instincts and a susceptibility to a “crowd contagion.”

— Alexandra Robbins

18. “Sometimes Eli believed his mother was embarrassed by him. “I swear, my mom thinks if I do one thing differently than the average person, I’m weird,” Eli said later. “It’s like she thinks I’m a freak or something. No matter what I do, it’s not ‘normal’ enough for her.”

— Alexandra Robbins

19. “What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.”

— Alexandra Robbins

20. “The trade-off seems like a no-brainer. Would you rather be bribed during your hospital stay with made-to-order omelets or would you rather be, for example, not dead?”

— Alexandra Robbins

21. “When a child sees herself through the prism of her peer group, the resulting self image can be distorted.”

— Alexandra Robbins

22. “Medicine asked something extraordinary of nurses: to forge intimate connections with another person for hours, weeks, or months, to care thoroughly and holistically – and then to let that individual suddenly go, often never to be heard from again.”

— Alexandra Robbins

23. “Instead of revamping school policies to welcome every child, many school systems are bent on revamping the students to conform to their schools.”

— Alexandra Robbins

24. “Conformity is a mask behind which students can hide their identity or the fact that they haven’t yet figured out their identity.”

— Alexandra Robbins

25. “Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don’t feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them.”

— Alexandra Robbins

26. “You need to add a new voice inside your head, one that says, “So what?” What if you don’t get married by 30? So what? What if you haven’t paid off your loans or debt by 35? So what? What if you’re not a stand-out success by 28? So what? If you were to achieve everything you wanted in life by the age of 30, then what would you do for the next fifty years? You have time. You don’t have to get to everything right now.”

— Alexandra Robbins

27. “QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.”

— Alexandra Robbins

28. “No student should be encouraged – by anyone – to change himself until he’s “normal,” a term that says everything and means nothing.”

— Alexandra Robbins

29. “Nonconformists aren’t just going against the grain; they’re going against the brain. Either their brains aren’t taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.”

— Alexandra Robbins

30. “There might be some residue in my mouth, but if I can breathe from my nasal passage, the air won’t come from my mouth or my diaphragm.”

— Alexandra Robbins

31. “If there is a single factor that spells out the difference between the cafeteria fringe headed for greatness and those doomed for low self-worth, even more than a caring teacher or a group of friends, it is supportive, accepting parents who not only love their children unconditionally, but also don’t make them feel as if their idiosyncrasies qualify as “conditions” in the first place.”

— Alexandra Robbins

32. “The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group’s opinion trumps the individual’s before he even becomes aware of it.”

— Alexandra Robbins

33. “The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.”

— Alexandra Robbins

34. “How could he encapsulate in a pithy admissions-interview line all of his unique ideas and interests?”

— Alexandra Robbins

35. “My heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother’s alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that her in mother’s mind she had already failed.”

— Alexandra Robbins

36. “It was a relief to inhabit someone else’s life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character’s problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.”

— Alexandra Robbins

37. “Membership in small groups allows people to feel similar and different at the same time: similar because they are a part of a group in different because the group is separate from the masses.”

— Alexandra Robbins

38. “The cafeteria made him feel like an observer rather than a participant in the high school experience.”

— Alexandra Robbins

39. “Group membership can modify individuals’ perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an “imaginary audience”, meaning that they believed that other people are just as attuned to their appearance and behavior as they are.”

— Alexandra Robbins

40. “Groups satisfy our brain’s natural inclination to make sense of hordes of people we encounter and observe. This quality is so inherent that children intuitively understand the need to form groups without adults having to teach them.”

— Alexandra Robbins

41. “I love my job, and I hope people find comfort in knowing there are still people out there who love what they do.” – a New York acute care nurse.”

— Alexandra Robbins

42. “Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being “normal” and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.”

— Alexandra Robbins

43. “Teenage drinking has been declining since 1999, but students vastly overestimate their classmates’ use of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. For example, a study conducted at a Midwestern high school when teenage alcohol use was peaking found that students believed that 92% of their peers Frank alcohol and 85% smoked cigarettes. When researchers surveyed the school to unearth the actual statistics, they learned that 47% of students had consumed alcohol and 17% smoked.”

— Alexandra Robbins

44. “And when they are out in public, “we are secretly looking at people’s arms to determine where we would start an IV,” an Arizona nurse said. “Sometimes if I’m out with a group of nurses, we’re like, ‘Wow, look at those veins. I could hit those from across the room.”

— Alexandra Robbins