Quotes About Otherness

Artists are men who want to become inhuman.

Diversity allows whites to remove themselves while requiring the Other to continue performing for them.

And so diversity remains a premonition of racial apocalypse; a photo op and dash; a commodity conveying value; a marker of moral credibility, even fitness in the Darwinian sense; a term of corporate management; an offering of racial innocence and absolution; a refusal of protection to historically negated communities of color; a performance for entertainment or edification or exploitation; another boring lesson in tolerance and civility; a mark of Otherness.

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

I don't reside on your planet. I have never lived.

being discriminated against as a tragic stranger.

I am now a killer and an immortal, inorganic, an intellectual stranger.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn't view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.

I don't want to believe that we're the only beings out there, because to me, that's even scarier than there being other life forms. I think I always like the idea of there being something a little bit crazier than us out there.

When I watch alien movies, I want to be the alien. I don't want to be the people that make first contact or anything; I just want to be that creature.

As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.

You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling.

From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.

Sir, talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results.

A person is okay," he said, peering into the darkness and the open street. "But when you put a bunch of us together, something is switched on, something ugly." He glanced at her apologetically. "All of us, humans and nonhumans alike, are genetically primed to attack what's different from the collective.

What do they want?" "They want all the freaks dead. Funny. I don't

Never, never make the mistake of thinking you're the only alien on the planet . But that's exactly the way I did feel – different desks, different schedule, halls and halls and halls that all looked the same to me. Everybody else knew their way around. I might as well have been a million light years from home. And lost.

The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")

Absolute alterity, as long as it remains absolute, cannot be apprehended at all; there is, effectively, no such thing.

It creates out our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien--one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.

I have come to have a great affection for monsters...

Earth people made him uncomfortable, particularly in groups.

We lack the analogies' was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere after encountering Area X.