Top 100 The Outsider Quotes
#1. That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or
Trevor Noah
#2. I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.
Lily King
#3. Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.
Andy Serkis
#4. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider.
Frank Herbert
#5. It only looks easy to the outsider. So if you want this thing called success, get ready to work hard. It won't be easy and it isn't guaranteed. But if you dream big and give it your all, it will be worth it.
James Woosley
#6. The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.
Flannery O'Connor
#7. Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to Jesus Christ. While the Democrats are really good at making the outsider feel at home, the Republicans make little or no effort.
Dinesh D'Souza
#8. It definitely sharpened my interest in language, the way people used language, slang words, speech patterns. There's a big advantage to being the outsider.
Amy Heckerling
#9. The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an "I", but it is not his true "I".' His main business is to find his way back to himself.
Colin Wilson
#10. It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in.
Asne Seierstad
#11. I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand ... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.
Jennifer Egan
#12. But the outsider in May, the one from Briery Swamp who had never fit quite right, kept her tucked safely in her nook.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
#13. I look for a thematic idea running through my movies and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it.
Martin Scorsese
#14. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.
Audre Lorde
#15. To be the outsider is actually a great thing in England.
Edie Campbell
#16. I have the outsider's vision, which is creating wisdom I can share with the world. The fact that I am misunderstood has always given me an added impetus to work on communication to bridge the gap.
Yoko Ono
#17. [...]speak for and from our most intimate knowledge, yet simultaneously extend the boundaries around ourselves to include the "outsider," to include more than we have been, more than we thought we could imagine.
Kirsten Backstrom
#18. I'd be the outsider gal who undergoes a makeover in the end [in the 'The Breakfast Club' ].
Greta Salpeter
#20. I'm not a media darling. I'm forever the outsider, for whatever the reason is.
Russell Peters
#21. 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
#22. You will always be the outsider, Nemesis had told him, the seventh wheel. You will not find a place among your brethren.
Rick Riordan
#23. Girls on the other hand, have always come easy. I don't know why that is, exactly. Maybe it's the outsider vibe and a well-placed brooding look.
Kendare Blake
#24. This 'archaic' stage of Sumerian script is not wholly understood by modern scholarship; and Sumerology is a tightly-knit, somewhat secretive academic discipline, which does not make it easy for the outsider to form a clear view of the current state of knowledge in the field.
Geoffrey Sampson
#25. I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.
Willem Dafoe
#26. I've always straddled a weird line - there's a lot of mainstream stuff that I love. At the same, I still feel like an outsider. I'm the outsider who's on the inside.
Zooey Deschanel
#27. I found it very easy to transform into creeps and weirdos and losers and goof-balls, and I'm happy to play eccentric kinds of characters, and I have a great affinity for the outsider, but I definitely am about expanding my range as well.
Rainn Wilson
#28. I think the thrust of any child is to try to fit in and be part of it. And I can't tell you how many times my humor, you know, what I thought was humor ended up making me the outsider. Like I'd be, I go, 'It's a joke.' And they'd go, 'Well, what was funny?' And they just thought I was insane.
Howie Mandel
#29. He's not from here, that's the thing," Cub said.
"Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to nobody outside this county? Where's that going to leave us?
Barbara Kingsolver
#30. The extreme disparity between the outsider's and insider's perspectives arises because they have vastly different conceptions of time. Although the point is far from obvious, we'll now see what appears as endless time to an outsider appears as endless space, at each moment of time, to an insider.
Brian Greene
#31. I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.
Abigail Washburn
#33. Dutch isn't easy for the outsider to learn, because it's spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex.
Augusten Burroughs
#34. Pretty much everywhere I go, I'm pretty much thinking I'm going to be bounced. I am still the outsider who snuck into the party. I identify with the regular person, because that is who I am.
Kathy Griffin
#35. I have tried hard to punish myself for that, and certain other things. No more. Let the Outsider punish me; we deceive ourselves when we think that we can measure out justice to ourselves. I wanted to end my guilt. What was just about that? I should feel guilty. I deserve it.
Gene Wolfe
#36. What? An alien. You think I'm from outer space." She snorts in disbelief. "I'm Kelly Tillman, you dumb-ass. From 41 Montana Avenue, Valentine, Texas. What's left of it. I canned seventh grade for a piece-of-crap job with lousy tips and lousy hours. You ain't telling me I'm the outsider here. No way.
Philip Webb
#37. Sometimes, it is necessary for me to step back from my emotions and my life. I need to be the outsider looking in, sitting in the objective chair, as a witness. As opposed to being so entangled in my feelings, that they become a noose around my neck.
Jaeda DeWalt
#38. Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi - the pracharak versus the prince, the 'outsider' versus the 'insider', the meritocrat versus the dynast, the small-town tea boy versus the child of elite privilege.
Rajdeep Sardesai
#39. The one who tried too hard, the outsider, the oddball. Yeah, that was me.
Idina Menzel
#40. Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me.
Adrian Tomine
#41. Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.
Colin Wilson
#42. Trevisan is one of the few Paso Robles producers to recognize the potential of the region's old-vine Zinfandel, which he blends with Syrah and Mourvedre and labels with fanciful names such as Problem Child, the Outsider and Cherry Red.
Robert M. Parker Jr.
#43. For the outsider
and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else
something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an 'artistic decline'.
Heinrich Boll
#44. This man was different from all others; he was forbidden fruit, the outsider. Her mother had trained her well, but she had never told her what to do if a man set her heart to throbbing like the hooves of a runaway horse.
Constance O'Banyon
#45. Geeks are running the world, anyone who's seen The Social Network knows the dynamic has shifted, but what I think is iconic and timeless about Peter Parker is that he's an outsider, on the outside looking in, and that was something I thought was very important to protect.
Marc Webb
#46. I can't believe the world was created in six days. I do not take Genesis or Revelation literally. I AM OUT. I am alone. I am an outsider for Christ. I will study my Bible, and pray to God in private and alone. I have no other choice.
Anne Rice
#47. Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement.
Bart D. Ehrman
#48. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?
Langston Hughes
#49. The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#50. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
James Salter
#51. The double jeopardy of being black and female in a racist and sexist society may well make one less afraid of the sanctions against success. A non-subservient black woman is by definition a transgressive- she is the ultimate outsider.
Mamphela Ramphele
#52. I feel like I've always been a weirdo. I always grew up with the sense of being a total outsider. I grew up so alienated from other people, and it never went away. When I'm around "normal" people I behave around them as if they are crazy, which makes me seem crazy.
Young Jean Lee
#53. The thing about being an outsider ... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
Mike Nichols
#54. I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
Allegra Huston
#55. My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.
Peter C. Doherty
#56. Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.
Ville Valo
#57. I was always an outsider, proud of being an outsider. I always reveled in the outsiders.
John Zorn
#58. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#59. Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.
Ben Goldacre
#60. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.
John O'Donohue
#61. The one [thing about Amish life] that I'm always going to miss is the closeness that I've had with my family. I still talk to them, but I'm an outsider.
Kate Stoltzfus
#62. One of our most deep-seated fears is that we might be called an "outsider." This fear has led us down the road to conformity, has put the imprint of "the organization man" on our souls, and has robbed us of originality of thought, individuality of personality, and constructive action.
Billy Graham
#64. I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.
Tift Merritt
#65. The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.
Wes Anderson
#66. I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Virginia Woolf
#67. Rehnquist was just reflecting his shifting role, from outsider to the institutional embodiment of the Court.
Jeffrey Toobin
#68. I was the punk outsider who nobody messed with. I was fearless. At 16, I graduated and moved out.
Angelina Jolie
#69. I had no idea what I was walking into, and the years and years of hard work it would take. I felt like an outsider and like it was never going to happen. But even if I would have known, I think I still would have done it. Dancers are perfectionists, and that's what keeps us going and growing.
Misty Copeland
#70. I approach everything as an absolute outsider. It is the only way I can break so many rules.
Klaus Nomi
#71. Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.
Jean Webster
#72. Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.
Louise J. Kaplan
#73. I was a bit of an outsider in the hip-hop world because I was a scratch kid and people weren't necessarily trying to hear that all the time.
A-Trak
#74. No disrespect to any other god, but Shiva's an outsider god. He breaks the rules. He's a brilliant musician, a brilliant dancer; he treats his wife as an equal, and she opposes him many times, but he obsessively loves her.
Amish Tripathi
#75. I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.
Edwidge Danticat
#76. I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.
Rabih Alameddine
#77. When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest.
Molly Crabapple
#78. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Anyone who lives inside the US can never be considered an outsider anywhere in the country
Martin Luther King Jr.
#79. In some ways, my most comfortable feeling has been that of being an outsider coming in, but over the years I've tired of that and I'm ready to feel at home. That's what music gives me: a feeling of absolute home.
Abigail Washburn
#80. I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.
Garry Wills
#81. The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.
Carlisle Floyd
#82. I don't know if it's because my father's from Argentina, that I'm the son of an immigrant, I don't know if its because I'm Jewish, but I have always been mindful that the best insights occur when you have some kind of an outsider perspective.
Mark Leibovich
#83. I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.
Barry Unsworth
#84. I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because ... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else ... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.
Jamaica Kincaid
#86. Sometimes it takes an outsider, someone with fresh eyes to see the truth.
Ally Carter
#87. He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
#88. Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.
Phyllis Bottome
#89. Being a "lone wolf" has is advantages you can look from outside in and the inside out, you can get a sense for something from the clarity of being an outsider. You are free from the constraints of negative influence.
Paul Isaacs
#90. I've always been interested in writing from the perspective of an outsider.
Isaac Marion
#91. In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.
Danny Rimer
#92. Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.
Kathryn Harrison
#93. I'm just trying to have fun, and maybe the way I hold myself kind of freaks people out. I don't feel like an outsider, and I think my friends feel the same way I do. Now that we're playing to larger audiences, maybe we're weird to some people. But I'm trying to express what I am.
Mac DeMarco
#94. there's a bit of darkness inherent in this vice-free society (located on a replica of Earth) which simply banishes its lower class. Still, it's an interesting approach to imagining a simpler/better world. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach Print | Kindle The story of the first outsider admitted
Anonymous
#95. A thing we always talk about in today's culture is that nobody is an outsider - everybody's kind of a hipster on the inside.
Chris Stein
#96. Every land has its own special rhythm, and unless the traveler takes the time to learn the rhythm, he or she will remain an outsider there always.
Juliette De Bairacli Levy
#97. When I was young, no one wanted to be one; now even the President of the United States would call himself an outsider. So now I'm for insiders.
John Waters
#98. I think the second, or outsider's, perspective can come as you layer a story. It's as though you've grabbed a secondary character and asked them, "What do you make of this guy?" and the hope is that the answer surprises you as the writer.
Tom Barbash
#99. The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned.
Olivia Sudjic
#100. My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
Alice Hoffman
