Outsiders Quotes

“Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.” So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”
― Audre Lorde

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“We of alien looks or words must stick together.”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“I can't beat you, I can't join you.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.
You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.
That includes women. Most especially women ...
To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.”
― Leymah Gbowee, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War

“They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.”
― Henry James

“This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance.”
― Gerhard Falk, Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders

“In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

“We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.”
― Jamake Highwater, The Mythology of Transgression: Homosexuality as Metaphor

“I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals."

The Panopticon”
― Jenn Fagan

“I knew he would be dead, because Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.”
― S.E. Hinton

“For anybody who's tracking actual predictive power, The Fringe will surprisingly keep being the place where reality is spotted first.”
― Bret Weinstein

“Science itself is a quasi-religious faith, and is full of dogmas relating to its current paradigm, and any scientists who do not agree with the establishment are kicked out of science altogether – like heretics, freethinkers and blasphemers in religion.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“It's all that time reading, dreaming, and goofing off with fellow oddballs where our best selves get to involve as teenagers.”
― Rainn Wilson

“If you don't like my queer ways you can kiss my fucking ass”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance

“...there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are. It's not just that there are so many Gentiles there; it's that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“You know better than most what a violent world this is... even more so if you're walking around in it not being and looking how the dodgy majority want you to be and look.”
― Kelly Thompson, King Deadpool, Vol. 1

“So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn't; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy's red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn who called himself the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater or the black who carried a rose and noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who'd collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“Това бяха семейства без корени, родени някъде и отраснали никъде. Нямаха връзка с Рейтвердегем, нито пък желаеха да имат; причината да се преместят тук бяха само и единствено наличните още терени – парцелите в града бяха поскъпнали или бяха станали рядкост. Нито веднъж тези хора не се представиха на новите си съседи, не посещаваха нито празненствата, нито кръчмите им, не се включваха в инициативите им. Страняха от панаирите им, за по-сигурно си влагаха парите в банката, а не като местните – в касичка, нарочена за кръчмите, която щом се напълнеше достатъчно, се пропиваше за една мимолетна нощ. Новите ни гледаха недоверчиво, докато се прибирахме традиционно нафиркани, или се спотайваха уплашени, докато млатехме нервните си жени или мятахме част от обзавеждането през прозореца. Ала ако някой беше снимал предаване за нас, онези щяха да седнат пред телевизора.”
― Dimitri Verhulst

“Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi produced one of the most exquisite commentaries on Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of Love. This great poet-scholar had initially been associated with wondering qalandars, a group of outsiders who disregarded social norms and incurred the wrath of the orthodox community.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“Throughout my life, I have been drawn to outsiders. The ultimate outsiders were the Beat Poets. Read the Beat Poets' work aloud. Their modern equivalent would be rappers. ”
― Gordon Roddick

“The Beat Poets wrote spontaneously, ignoring accepted form in favour of the complex rhythms of everyday speech. ”
― Gordon Roddick

“I have always been inspired by those who have gone their own way, who have challenged orthodoxy and the status quo and sought to make a difference, right wrongs, and often put up with being unpopular for saying and doing what they think is right.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Real heroes live by a different drumbeat, verging or merging into anarchy. They break the rules and smash moulds. Some of them rampage through life with disrespect for what they leave in their slipstream.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Once we have left the womb
Are we not all
Outsiders?”
― Elsa Gidlow, Sapphic Songs: Eighteen to Eighty

“A universally loved rebel, an immensely popular loner, the imaginary writer is everyone's favorite, if only because you don't have to read anything to appreciate their work, although I must say I prefer their earlier stuff.”
― Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?