Strangeness Quotes

“People are strange . . .”
― Jim Morrison

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

“The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun…”
― Jim Morrison

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.”
― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase

“Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.

Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.

Some, downright weird.

But then again, you’d have to be.

To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.”
― Christopher Hopper

“For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Perhaps we only leave
So we may once again arrive,
To get a bird's eye view
Of what it means to be alive.
For there is beauty in returning,
Oh how wonderful, how strange,
To see that everything is different
But know it's only you who's changed.”
― Erin Hanson

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”
― Alain de Botton

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run

“Normal....
What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.
So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?
Would our normal, become our new wierd?”
― Catherine

“Ah, sweetie. If the poets couldn’t unriddle them, then you certainly can’t. Be kind, and keep your ears on offer if she wants to talk. But you can’t draw out the strangeness, Edgar. It’s not a poison.”
― Allyse Near, Fairytales for Wilde Girls

“In my family strange is relative.”
― Kate Rockland, Falling Is Like This

“I look and I look...
I must have come to the wrong planet.
It's so strange here.”
― Sigbjørn Obstfelder

“Being very strange kept people away. And if people stayed away, you could never disappoint them.”
― Michael Buckley, The Weirdies

“Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces--sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Beware of Strangers
As children, they teach us
To beware of strangers,
To refrain from approaching them.

As we grow older we learn
That no one is stranger than those
We thought we’d known all our lives.

As we grow older we learn
That a stranger may carry more empathy,
And may understand us more deeply.
Even feelings of affection from a stranger
May be more sincere.

And so I ask:
can humanity and the strangeness be synonymous?
Could we say:
I am a stranger; therefore I am?

Can we truly feel alive
Without strange things
Strange encounters
without strangers
reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating?

They teach us to avoid strangers,
And life teaches us
that human awareness can only be borne out
Of the dagger of strangeness…
That life is tasteless
When we don’t mix it with strangers…
That familiarity is opposed to life!
And thus, I loudly declare:
A stranger I was born. A stranger I wish to remain!
And I ask that you issue my death certificate
The day I become familiar.

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 29 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as sweets. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among others who are distant and unrecognizable. Then a particular kind of wisdom awakens—an ability to surmise, to grasp the things that aren't obvious. Cleverness and acumen come about. A person who is a stranger gains a new point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage. Who was it who convinced us that being comfortable and familiar was so great? Only foreigners can truly understand the way things work.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.”
― Charles Simic

“Sometimes, in their wide-eyed, ashamed, fanatical temperament, their humanity spills out in a discomfort that is nearly frightening. But, we all harbor some form of innocent strangeness that we keep to ourselves—our fears, our obsessions, our questionable sanities. They are the reasons why we do things— routes we take, instruments we learn, and CDs we buy. It sounds like honey, but I’m not just being an essayist here. I do believe it. And it’s the truth because today, I’d like to share my strange with you.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“He had large hazel eyes. They looked at you but, somehow, they didn't seem to see you. They looked right through you. The other thing I noticed about Rajiv were his ears, and how they jutted out from the sides of his head. Could anyone blame me for thinking he was ugly?”
― Janet Olearski, The Boy Who Never Smiled

“People who look unartistic create the most artistic art.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Estranho é o mundo, pai, que só une se desunindo; erguida sobre acidentes, não há ordem que se sustente; não há nada mais espúrio do que o mérito, e não fui eu que semeei esta semente.”
― Raduan Nassar, Lavoura Arcaica