Quotes About Otherness

In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.

Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life. Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally.

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture"—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other

The galaxy is full of creatures that are nothing like us at all. We can try to understand them, and we should. But even if we acccept that they're doing what comes naturally, one is not beholden to comply when the sarlacc asks for dinner.--Ben Kenobi

When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.

I walked back through those corridors. My mind was bare, my skin bristling as if it would rise off my flesh. Every noise, every touch, the stones beneath my feet, the splash of fountains from a window, crept evilly upon my senses. The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.

I felt myself a stranger to the world

Everything around me looks like me and I look like nothing here

One of us... One of them... One of us... One of them... A rhythm playing like train wheels on a circular track -- never ending but going nowhere.

the difference between the tolerant and the extremist was not so great. "Looking into the Other, we can always find something of ourselves within.

They are no longer human beings. I don't know any other way to describe them. There is something about them that causes an instinctive reaction of "wrong!" in normal people—

It is always important to realize that people attack what is unfamiliar to them.

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else.

When people are scared, it's easy for them to decide anything different is evil. To forget that everyone is basically the same, that we all love our families and want regular lives. And what makes it worse is that some people use that. They make others scared on purpose, because they know if they do, everyone will start acting stupid. -But why would they want that? -It's a way to control people. A way to get what they want.

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

As Luce Iri- garay explains, "What makes me one, and perhaps even unique, is the fact that you are and I am not you.

We are the things that others fear, " I said. "Remember that.

Yes. Miss Halfwolf scares me a lot. But that doesn't make her a monster. Don't be like the Witches, Master Ren. They call us monsters because it makes it easier to hurt us. But monsters are people, too.

They call us monsters because it makes it easier to hurt us. But monsters are people, too.

One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.

All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact -- all that?

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?