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

“His sadistic attitude is allied with a desire for self-abasement which in my opinion constitutes the very foundation of his character: he knows that it is dangerous to stand out and that his behavior irritates society, but nevertheless he seeks and attracts persecution and scandal. It is the only way he can establish a more vital relationship with the society he is antagonizing. As a victim, he can occupy a place in the world that previously ignored him; as a delinquent, he can become one of its wicked heroes…

[He] is impassive and contemptuous, allowing all these contradictory impressions to accumulate around him until finally, with a certain painful satisfaction, he sees them explode into a tavern fight or a raid by the police or a riot. And then, in suffering persecution, he becomes his true self, his supremely naked self, as a pariah, a man who belongs nowhere. The circle that began with provocation has completed itself and he is ready now for redemption, for his entrance into the society that rejected him.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“To them, we are outsiders, Reeve, and nobody is more vulnerable than a person who is other.”
― A.L. Tait, The Fire Star

“She’s a little lost girl in her own little world,
She looks so happy but she seems so sad, oh yeah,
Oh, oh, yeah.
She’s a little lost girl in her own little world,
I’d like to help her, I’d like to try, oh yeah,
Oh, oh yeah.

She talks to birds, she talks to angels,
She talks to trees, she talks to bees,
She don’t talk to me.
Talks to the rainbows and to the seas,
She talks to trees,
She don’t talk to me.”
― Joey Ramone

“Can you imagine … it’s now up to the common herd to decide what outsiderism is, and how it should be presented. Real outsiders don’t give a fuck what a bunch of liberal cunts think. That’s exactly what radicals are opposed to. Can you imagine – the outsider without an outside … the outsider acceptable to the flock, the sheeple. Isn’t that the definition of an insider? You can’t be a Gadfly if you don’t piss anyone off.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

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

“They weren't interested, because I was the one who wanted to join them, and not the other way around.”
― Matti Friedman

“Being an immigrant is not a status but a state of mind. It doesn’t stop when you “assimilate” or “integrate” or when you go from being an “outsider” to an “insider.” It is what you think of yourself. You only really stop being an immigrant when you reject other immigrants and try to slam the door in their faces when they try to emulate you.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The people that change the world are the world-historic figures that make the world believe what they believe about themselves. These people never believe the world. Like Dr. Stockmann, they stand proudly alone”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“It’s up to Illuminists alone. No one else is coming. We are against everyone. We are enormously outnumbered and surrounded, yet victory is certain to be ours ... because we are the Gnostic Legion of Reason and Knowledge, and we shall command the cosmic forces that can defeat any odds.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Contra Mundum

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

“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

“If you don't like my queer ways you can kiss my fucking ass”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders

“...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

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