Quotes About Otherness

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

The unenlightened call him "Frankenstein," confusing him with his creator. The less-unenlightened call him "the monster," confusing him with his popular reception by the villagers and the local constabulary. But none of us knows, really, what to call him: knows, as it were, what name he would choose for himself, if he were given the choice.

The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, "the others.

When people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.

They're afraid of our ability to hear the stars. [...] And to them it makes us alien.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.

I feel trapped in my body. I want to be like like Scarlett Johansson in 'Lucy,' when she unlocks everything within her - I want to do that. I want to be the alien in 'Arrival' - a spitty, infinite-time-loop creature.

In no man's land, alien is the queen.

If you're not a beautiful monster, then you're a villager," he said

Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks—all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.

I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

Le fou ce ne sera plus l'exilé, celui qu'on repousse dans les marges de nos villes, mais celui qu'on rend étranger à lui même en le culpabilisant d'être celui qu'il est.

There can only be a true life as an other life, and it's from the point of view of this other life that the ordinary life of ordinary people will be made to appear as precisely other than the true. I live in an other way, and through the very alterity of my life, I show you that what you are looking for is elsewhere than where you are looking, that the road you are taking is an other road than the one you should be taking.

Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things -Bram Stoker, Dracula

There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time. Usually associated with invasions, abductions, or other hostile acts, the term "alien" gets a bad rap. But over the years, the word has come to mean something very different to me... future friend material.

Oh, we're always all right. You remember that. We happen to other people. -Nanny Ogg

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

Pentru mine, ca b?rbat, femeia e stranie ?i str?in? (atât de stranie încât sfâr?e?te prin a deveni "mister")

You realize that, to the boy with the gun, it probably doesn't matter what particular "other" he is looking at. Or maybe he doesn't mistake Sam for Ant.

The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.