Quotes About Otherness

As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was not an experience completely without interest or even pleasure. The clown's shibboleth of "here we are again" took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself a novitiate of a more rarified order of harlequinry. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")

We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

life is other, always there, further off, beyond you and beyond me, always on the horizon, life which unlives us and makes us strangers, that invents our face and wears it away

Para que pueda ser he de ser otro, salir de mí, buscarme entre los otros, los otros que no son si yo no existo, los otros que me dan plena existencia.

Más interesante era verme la nuca, algo que todavía me provoca un escalofrío haciéndome pensar que mi cuerpo es en realidad un extraño que hace años que llevo encima.

I aint sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build a annex on to hell.

People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you.

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people's cruelty toward "the other"—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them. . . .

The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.

But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.

To be yellow in America...a special guest star, forever the guest. Fade to black.

The point of an animal was not for it to love you; it was that you could love it. In all it's otherness, your unbelonging to its kind, it could yet receive-boundlessly-your love.

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

Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.

Ieder mens heeft geloof ik het gevoel, dat hij er eigenlijk niet bijhoort, bij het leven van de andere mensen. Dat hij op een of andere manier iets anders is, een gast, en hij doet alle mogelijke moeite om te zorgen, dat de anderen dat niet zullen merken. Dat is het gevoel, dat alle mensen gemeen hebben, en daardoor horen ze juist bij elkaar.

It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.

From my point of view, 'Stranger in a Strange Land' isn't just a science fiction masterpiece; it also happens to be one of my favorite books ever.

Recognizing the self-division of the other doesn't reduce everyone to sameness but eliminates the possibility for anyone's hierarchical elevation above another. It is a philosophy of universal equality through the split of every subject from itself.

My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world. That reinforced our 'otherness' on a daily basis.

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.