Quotes About Otherness

Once someone is an unreal other, we lose sight of how they hurt. Because we don't experience them as feeling beings, we not only ignore them, we can inflict pain on them without compunction. Not

He had said, hesitatingly, "Because they think we are different. So they are frightened of us." But what was different? thought the girl. What was so different?

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.

You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.

In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. 'Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!' When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.

She is sensitive. She does not see the world as it is. She's a bit up in the clouds. She cannot fit in.

Those whom we love are often the most alien to us.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

TotuÈ™i, înc? de la început, sunt configuraÈ›i ca duÈ™mani nu atât cei care ne amenin?? direct (cum ar fi cazul barbarilor), ci aceia pe care cineva are interes s?-i reprezinte ca fiind amenin??tori, chiar dac? nu ne amenin?? direct, astfel încât nu caracterul lor amenin??tor s? le scoat? în relief alteritatea, ci alteritatea lor s? devin? semn de ameninÈ›are.

Pe de o parte, ne putem recunoaÈ™te pe noi înÈ™ine numai în prezenÈ›a Altuia, È™i pe acest fapt se sprijin? regulile de convieÈ›uire È™i înÈ›elegere. Dar mai degrab? îl g?sim insuportabil pe acest Altul, pentru c? într-o m?sur? oarecare nu este noi. AÈ™a c?, reducându-l la un duÈ™man, ne construim infernul nostru pe p?mânt.

Intentar entender al otro significa destruir los clichés que lo rodean, sin negar ni borrar su alteridad. Pero

Ahora bien, desde el principio se construyen como enemigos no tanto a los que son diferentes y que nos amenazan directamente (como sería el caso de los bárbaros), sino a aquellos que alguien tiene interés en representar como amenazadores aunque no nos amenacen directamente, de modo que lo que ponga de relieve su diversidad no sea su carácter de amenaza, sino que sea su diversidad misma la que se convierta en señal de amenaza. Véase

for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of "other I's," the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I's, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.

There was only one possible answer, as plain as it was disturbing. That she was not, in fact, human.

It is the mundanes who look at me and see something they do not understand—a boy who is not quite white and not quite foreign either." "Just as I am not human, and not demon either," Tessa said softly. His eyes softened. "You are human," he said. "Never think you are not. I have seen you with your brother; I know how you care for him. If you can feel hope, guilt, sorrow, love—then you are human.

How had it happened, Simon thought, that he was bound to these people—to people who thought of him as nothing more than a Downworlder, half human at best?

Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.

The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in selfness, a becoming other of the self. At the point at which I perceive my existence as pleasant, my perception is traversed by a concurrent perception that dislocates it and deports it towards the friend, towards the other self. Friendship is this desubjectivization at the very heart of the most intimate perception of self.

I actually don't meet very many men because they are, I guess, afraid to approach me or think that I'm from another planet.

An old man came on board my boat; the others, both men and women cried with loud voices: "Come and see the men who have come from the sky. Bring them victuals and drink."