Quotes About Otherness

Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...

I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time.

If there is a trait embedded even more deeply in the mainstream American character than the pursuit of money, it is fear of the Other.

It seems that it is incredibly easy to end up on the slippery slope where something about ourselves, our faithfulness in this case, becomes more important than our partner. The Otherness of the other again drops out of the picture, and we wind up dealing with the One (an idea, ideal, or signifier), not the Other. Libido becomes inextricably bound up with the symbolic, steering clear of the real.

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.

Why can't I have normal friends?' Stonny demanded. 'Ones without tiger stripes and cat eyes? Ones without a hundred thousand souls riding their backs? Here comes a rider from that other lagging company – maybe he's normal! Hood knows, he's dressed like a farmer and looks inbred enough to manage only simple sentences. A perfect man! Hey! You! No, what are you hesitating for? Come to us, then! Please!

You should know by now that this time of year is not one when we pale-skinned interlopers can walk at ease in the treacherous labyrinth of this witch of cities.

He had sent one of his licky-spits 'round, a lily-fleshed human boy with the glassy-eyed stare of the perpetually supped.

When he turned around to look, he once again saw white faces peering in stillness from high, insanely angled windows, and dimunitive bodies climbing up and down the almost vertical streets.

They were not quite like any humans I had met; perhaps touched with his difference, contaminated by the strangeness of his eternal solitude.

Dimly, with her burning heart more than her mind, she began to understand why she had always liked gay men. They suffered, were persecuted, they were outsiders in a world where studbuck male heteros held all the power, they did not count, they were Other – the way women were.

Fear of "the other" may be an animating force for many supporters of far-right parties, but "inclusion" of the other within an inherently unjust system will not be powerful enough to defeat those forces.

They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn't pretend to be a neighbor.

People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.

Durerea mi-a vorbit astfel:Tu nu e?ti om.E?ti o f?ptur? care nu se poate amesteca printre oameni.O vie?uitoare cam trist? ?i ciudat?,e?ti departe de a fi om

As Antigone said, I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts.

For a Christian is one whom the world does not know.

In the one place everyone looks like me--has my name--i am the most foreign.

The Essence and Character of a People, his overriding message was that Judaism is an "eternal countercultural." In his book, Hertzberg declares, "Abraham, the first Jew, is the archetypal Jewish character. As the leader of a small, dissenting minority living precariously on the margins of society, he defines the enduring role of the Jew as the outsider. The recurring themes of Jewish history—otherness, defiance, fragility, and morality—are present in his life.

there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room—the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.

once you become their Other, you're no longer a person. You're just an idea, an abstraction of everything that's wrong with their world. Give them the slightest excuse, and they will tear you down. And the easiest way for them to target you as this Other is to find something that's different about you. Color of your skin. The way you speak. The place you're from. Magic. It comes and goes in cycles, Kate. Each new generation picks their own Other.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

Nada de cíclopes, ni gigantes, ni hombres con cuatro brazos y cabeza de perro, pero encontraréis con seguridad seres primitivos y malvados, especialmente entre los castellanos»