Otherness Quotes

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“When words remain unspoken and emotions are left unexpressed, just a glint in the eyes from otherness can inflame the mind and rouse a shower of empathy. ("Only needed a light ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When we are looking for the unexpected, we are not only looking for the unexpected in ourselves, but we are also curious about the unexpected in the behavior of the others. So as to know the others, we have got to learn how and where they differ from us. By understanding this, we are able to establish an uplifting link with otherness. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: ‘I’, 'me' and the 'others'. Since the “I” entails what I want; the “me” what others expect of me and the “others” what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", “surroundings” and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“In discovering the world, the "I" must meet otherness and converge with the "we." If we are prepared to leave our castle's safety, we can confront our sensitiveness with "outwardness", enhance our insight and tune up our pattern of life. (“Resilience”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“If we wrestle with traumas that do not want to give way and our inner little Red Riding Hood cannot get rid of the wolf's threatening giggles, we must not be afraid of opening ourselves to otherness that can trigger a salutary 'orienting reflex' propelling us into a new thinking pattern. ("Into a new life")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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, The Goldfinch

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”
― Clarice Lispector

“Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“An octopus in a tuxedo is still an octopus.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders

“I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“They call you heartless: but you have a heart, and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“J'admets la part de l'autre dans la constitution de mon destin.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, La Part de l'autre

“There are other people of other worlds and you should get to know those other people because what will teach you something different or spark a different thought in you is otherness!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“¨Everything I bought for that next life is on sale but I still don't fit.¨”
― K. Eltinaé, The Moral Judgement of Butterflies

“It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

“I felt I’d disappointed my parents. And my church. And my whole race, actually. Isn’t that the prevailing narrative for people in oppressed groups of all kinds: your ancestors suffered so you could achieve, so you better achieve. Rosa Parks didn’t sit on that bus for me to go to New York and turn gay.”
― R Eric Thomas

“Just outside the walls of the City, trouble was brewing. They came in boats from a land far across the sea. Many boats crammed with many hopefuls washed up on the shores in the shadow of the great cliffs. Like driftwood. These flotsam people were dazed, broken – perhaps at an extreme – optimistic. Surely there would be salvation within the thick city walls?
They appeared in a whisper – like the hissing of the surf. No citizen came to welcome them. No delegates. No photo-ops for ambitious politicians. Instead, only the City’s military – soldiers and officers with faces as hard and blank as the cliff the City teetered upon – were waiting.
They were herded in silence. Those without papers were left on the stony beach. There would be tents, bunks, and prefab houses in time.
The lucky ones were escorted up the great lifts and transported along the subway system – out of sight. A Downtown station would process them.
See this crowd of Driftwood people, Eva. See them huddle together in the dark, the glint of hope in their eyes. The color of their skin, how the women covered their hair, and how the men wore their beards – these were the superficial differences that would mark them so starkly here. The label of ‘other’ already hung around their necks without them even knowing.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Silent Symphony

“[Titus] knew that it was no dream, but he had no power to override the dream-like nature of it all. The reality was in himself — in his longing to experience the terror of what he already thought of as love.
He had heard of love: he had guessed at love: he had no knowledge of love but he knew all about it. What, if not love, was the cause of all this?
The head had been turned away. The limbs had floated. But it was not the beauty. It was the sin against the world of his fathers. It was the arrogance! It was the wicked swagger of it all! It was the effrontery! It was that Gormenghast meant nothing to this elastic switch of a girl!
But it was not only that she was so much the outward expression of all he meant by the word “Freedom”, or that the physical she and what she symbolized had become fused into one thing — it was not only this that intoxicated Titus — it was more than an abstract excitement that set his limbs trembling when he thought of her. [...] She was a thing that breathed the same air and trod the same ground, though she might have been a faun or a tigress or a moth or a fish or a hawk or a martin. Had she been any of these she would have been no more dissimilar from him than she was now. He trembled at the thought of this disparity. It was not closeness or a sameness, or any affinity or hope of it, that thrilled him. It was the difference, the difference that mattered; the difference that cried aloud.”
― Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

“I am something other than any living thing I have ever known.”
― Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp: In Search of London's Outer Limits

“During the Illumination process, some will see what is called “The Otherness of God,” or the non-human aspect. This is quite terrifying. However, the terror goes away when one knows it is as much God as Her human form. Still, this Way is not for the timid.”
― Laurence Galian

“Every culture has its vultures for whom the prospect of the death of the "other" brings tidings of a feast.”
― R.N. Prasher

“You don't understand that this happened to us—to real people. We were just like you, we weren't ready for this— nothing in our experience prepared us — there were no signs — we weren't fighting for centuries — it didn't come out of our perverted lifestyle — you all want it to be logical — you want us to be different than you are so you can convince yourselves it wouldn't happen there, where you are. That's why you turn us into stories, into beasts, Communists, people who live in a strange country and speak a strange language — then you can feel safe, superior. Then, afterward, we become freaks, the stories of freaks — fax, please — get us one raped Bosnian woman, preferably gang-raped, preferably English speaking.”
― Eve Ensler, Necessary Targets

“Somos libres porque nos movemos. Salimos de una herida llamada soledad y viajamos a otra herida llamada muerte. Hay un cruce de caminos entre el punto de partida y el punto de llegada. En ese corretear, mi niña adorada encontramos siempre al otro, al que no es como nosotros, y nos vemos obligados a entender que si nos movemos y nos encontramos, debemos amarnos a partir del contraste.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“We learn from traveling that it makes a huge difference to simply acknowledge and greet each other; to ask whenever possible or appropriate, whether someone is alright; and most importantly to foil the plans and intentions of fear and warmongers using every medium and platform to get us to distrust, hate, and be afraid of each other, or to beware of strangers."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako