Quotes About Otherness

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?

What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well. I don't want to have any intimate contact with them.

They stopped talking the moment they saw me, as if they were speaking some language I couldn't even begin to understand. And they probably were.

Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind.

There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. It is the past, with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ... Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it Year after year, But who can ever remember enough?

Becoming a monster sometimes isn't a choice that you have. We're all that; we're all 'the other' in one way or another.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

Everybody loves monsters.

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it, and hold it forever inaccessible. (I love you, someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder - Well, how much? - and when the answer comes - with my whole heart - we then wonder about the wholeness of the a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our fathers, our gods - they are all beyond us.

The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one's racial-ized rank is to lose one's own valued and enshrined difference.

Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.

The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger.

And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

We're werewolves. We don't get to judge 'crazy.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

In the darkness all the gods were strangers.

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

All the people like us are We, And everyone else is They.

I was all a mistake! There was a black fish swimming among all those white fish and that black fish was chosen to be me. I was a sister to none of them, I was ill chance itself, I was a shark, an infant black shark. Why did you not recognize it and cut its throat? What kind of merciful father were you who never cared for me but sent me out into the world a monster? Crush me, devour me, annihilate me before it is too late! Wipe me clean...

I always root for the monster.

Siempre me pongo del lado del monstruo.

Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.

Aber irgendwie wurde ich trotzdem das ungute Gefühl nicht los, dass sie mich weggeschickt hatten, weil sie sich vor mir fürchteten. Wie ein entsetzlich missgestaltetes Kind, das eigentlich das Säuglingsalter nicht hätte überstehen sollen, oder wie ein siamesischer Zwilling, dessen andere Hälfte unter dem Messer gestorben war, so war ich einfach nur dadurch, dass ich überlebt hatte, zu einem Monstrum geworden.