Quotes About Otherness

Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.

Frederick's dreaminess, his otherness—it's on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.

The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.

How strange. You're more Gowachin than a Gowachin.

Lost among these entirely strange people.

Looking on oneself as something alien, forgetting the sight, remembering the gaze.

Growing up in Texas, I was already dealing with the fact that I didn't even know I was Asian until a certain age. I just was informed about it in a somewhat negative way by my peers. And that immediately put me into that mindset where I felt very othered. My safety always felt like it wasn't something that I could consider a given.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

People are afraid of us. We're their monsters. Except they're the ones who are afraid of what they don't understand. They're the ones who ruin everything.

True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself.

You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.

I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.

The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…

Most friends had fallen away over the years. Either they'd started avoiding me, as if my grief and bad luck were contagious, or I'd started to avoid them, unwilling to give them the chance to disappoint me. Besides, too much time around normal people made me feel like an alien, unwanted and ugly, fluent in a different language.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling

When we read Victorian novels, we are often misled into thinking how close that age is to our own; but when we encounter historical fiction of the period we recognize something equally powerful: the nineteenth century's strange otherness, the mark of its and our own historicity.

the fabric of his shirt was woven of some Martian stuff; even his very skin was of another weave.

There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

human nature" had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of "natural men" had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, "barbarian" might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.

Everyone's quick to blame the alien.

I did 'Beetlejuice,' and it was a big movie, but it didn't help my high-school experience. In fact, it made it worse. I was a freak and a witch.

Witches are a cold breed who keep unto themselves.

Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that.

The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of 'us and them' breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as 'otherness'; and why this theme is relevant to today's rise in the far-Right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.