Top 78 Quotes About Otherness
#1. 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.
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.
Karen Armstrong
#4. The ego likes to emphasize the 'otherness' of others
Eckhart Tolle
#5. It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian ...
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#6. A true solitude is not unbearable since it allows for otherness.
Helene Cixous
#7. Instead of practicing philoxenos, which means loving the stranger, we find many times that the church is xenophobic. We forget that Jesus, whom we claim to follow, was the ultimate lover of otherness in people. Even differences in religion didn't freak Jesus out when it came to loving people.
Holly Sprink
#8. It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#9. My God, he thought, the man I once was!
The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
Philip Roth
#10. Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold - large, male and American.
Kate Atkinson
#11. He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was ...
Sheridan Hay
#12. The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness.
Hampton Sides
#13. Precise historical reasons are difficult to pinpoint, but red hair, it seems, bestows a sense of otherness. Red is the colour of blood and danger.
Kate Williams
#14. The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
Yann Martel
#15. In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.
Jean Houston
#16. He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness [ ... ]
Angela Carter
#17. I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
Siri Hustvedt
#18. You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
Martin Amis
#19. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
Clarice Lispector
#20. Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.
David Abram
#21. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
Aldous Huxley
#22. Through itself the soul arrives at all harmony that is perceptible in otherness-just as through what is internal the soul arrives at what is external.
Nicholas Of Cusa
#23. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
Gilles Deleuze
#24. Black and white is much closer to the condition of
dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was
part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.
John Boorman
#25. God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.
David Bentley Hart
#26. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?
Ransom Riggs
#28. Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.
Francesca Martinez
#29. He was an intense lover, and his zeal created in me a new sense of my own otherness. Sometimes after he was gone, I would examine myself naked in the mirror, and for an instant would imagine I saw what he saw - an enchanted body.
Siri Hustvedt
#31. Love is the very process of passing over, of transformation, of stepping outside the limitations of fallen humanity - in which we are all separated from one another and ultimately impenetrable to one another - into an infinite otherness.
Pope Benedict XVI
#32. It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.
William Boyd
#33. It may be that the best time for Otherness has already passed. Clearly part of the basis for this renaissance has been wealth, especially the unprecedented comfort enjoyed by the vast majority of Westerners since World War II, in which very few of us can even conceive of starving
David Brin
#34. We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive.
Neil Gaiman
#35. One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.
Mark Epstein
#36. So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.
Vincent Van Gogh
#37. People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.
Michael Pollan
#39. Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode
a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.
Christos Yannaras
#40. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.
Jack London
#41. Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.
Lynne Truss
#42. I recognize the divinity in you, but actually more like, I recognize our each-otherness, instantly
Anne Lamott
#43. Maturity implies otherness ... The art of living is the art of living with.
Julius Gordon
#44. Jesus was different. He possessed an awesome otherness. Lle was the supreme mysterious stranger. He made people uncomfortable.
R.C. Sproul
#45. I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.
Kara Walker
#46. You need a strong sense of 'otherness' to be able to create in your life.
Amos Lee
#47. The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.
Charles Williams
#48. When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. 'Here,' Jimmy said. 'Here is love, all of it.
Chris Abani
#49. Any ideas of 'other' are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of 'normal.'
Meshell Ndegeocello
#50. Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don't change.
M.L. Stedman
#51. I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.
Brian Froud
#52. All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
#53. It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.
Donna Tartt
#54. She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.
Joanne Harris
#55. Death, like the quintessence of otherness, is for others.
Woodrow Wilson
#56. I suddenly remember how different I am from most of the kids here. Nobody would have to drag me or my brothers to the Bahamas; we'd swim there if we could. For us, a family vacation is staying at a local hotel with a swimming pool for a weekend.
Angie Thomas
#57. This otherness problem is what the gospel "fixes," and the story of the Bible is the story of God's people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.
Scot McKnight
#59. There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?
Charles Wright
#60. At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I'd say that pagans have about the same experience of otherness and isolation as anyone else. We're not special in that regard. But this is because the problem of loneliness is almost universal - and that, to my mind, makes it much more serious.
Brendan Myers
#61. It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
William Kittredge
#62. Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued.
Harold Bloom
#63. Even the man whom we think we know best . . . is at bottom a stranger to us. He is different. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it (1928, p. 220-221).
Anonymous
#64. There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.
Marquis De Sade
#65. Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
Malcolm Gladwell
#66. When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made ... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.
D.H. Lawrence
#67. The point of an animal was not for it to love you; it was that you could love it. In all it's otherness, your unbelonging to its kind, it could yet receive-boundlessly-your love.
Charlotte Wood
#68. I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think.
Morag Joss
#69. 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.
Andrew Solomon
#70. [Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.
Nicholas Gane
#71. Enlightenment is the realization of the oneness of being, where otherness disappears.
Sharon Gannon
#72. I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.
Neil Gaiman
#73. Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.
Jodie Foster
#74. I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
Salman Rushdie
#75. We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
Tim O'Brien
#76. I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.
Clarice Lispector
#77. The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
#78. I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.
Sue Monk Kidd