Otherness Quotes

Quotes tagged as "otherness" Showing 1-30 of 94
Gilles Deleuze
“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Kamand Kojouri
“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

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

Erik Pevernagie
“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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa
“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

Erik Pevernagie
“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

Vincent van Gogh
“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

Erik Pevernagie
“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

Donna Tartt
“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

Clarice Lispector
“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

Aleksandar Hemon
“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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
“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

Ocean Vuong
“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

V (formerly Eve Ensler)
“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

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

Mehmet Murat ildan
“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

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

H.P. Lovecraft
“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

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

Laurence Galian
“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

Carlos Fuentes
“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

Louis Yako
“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

“To think morally involves reimagining one's life story in growing response to others in their very otherness from oneself.”
John Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood

“Ese día aprendimos que éramos mapuche para los ojos de los otros. Antes de ese día éramos solo niñas y niños. Desde ese momento, cuado digo Cafulqueo, me siento otra. Cada vez que pronuncio esa palabra-nombre, creo que conjuro algo y mi cuerpo no es mío.”
Daniela Catrileo, Piñen

Mandira Pattnaik
“In migration, above all topics, the levels of otherness, of hybridization and plurality, of shifting identities and friendships, are perhaps greater than in many other aspects of life. It is essentially the experience of choosing to forgo everything that is settled and established and moving on to construct a different reality—whether by choice or compulsion. I’d compare this with how wind etches the vast sand dunes in beautiful patterns, but chooses to deconstruct the same later, and rebuild it as it fancies.”
Mandira Pattnaik, Glass/Fire

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