Outsider Quotes

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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

“Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.”
― Elizabeth Lowell, Remember Summer

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.

And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.

But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”
― Tim Burton

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”
― Sylvia Plath

“I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I'm no spirit or demon. I'm nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I'll die.”
― Leanna Renee Hieber, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker

“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“As empaths, our high level of sensitivity means that we are prone to feeling like eternal outsiders who are in the world but not quite of the world.”
― Aletheia Luna, Awakened Empath: The Ultimate Guide to Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Healing

“What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of
normality that is just a myth.”
― Anne Rice, Exit to Eden

“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“She felt the warmth of Peter's arm under her neck, and it almost felt like he was an extension of her, and like if they had souls, they lay somewhere snug between their two bodies. Maybe all of her strangeness, her curse, her always feeling like an outsider, had all existed so that she could belong here, with Peter.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?”
― Richard Bachman, Thinner

“You guys are so caught up in your polished images and your passive-aggressive comments that no one ever comes right out and says anything. Well, I'm going to.”
― Richelle Mead, Gameboard of the Gods

“Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.”
― Peter Bogdonavich

“She stood awkwardly for another endless moment -- a total and obvious outsider, even though this was her house where she lived. It felt like she didn't belong anywhere. It felt like she probably never would.”
― Katie Cotugno, Top Ten

“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, May Bird Among the Stars

“I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Some people love Death to death, some people love Life for life.”
― W. Freedreamer Tinkanesh

“On a whim, I told Mom once about seeing the world as a series of grays, and she told me I was depressed. This didn’t feel like that. This emptiness was different.”
― Kayla Krantz, What I Did

“I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.”
― Emil M. Cioran

“For Sid, playing with monsters was the equivalent of playing with genders.”
― W. Freedreamer Tinkanesh

“If readers can come away seeing Alfred Wallis's paintings with fresh eyes - seeing not just the charm but the strength and experience behind them – I’ll know the last eight years of the book's production will have been incredibly worthwhile.”
― Matilda Webb, Alfred Wallis Child Pauper To Artistic Luminary

“...The spaces they frequent construct atmospheres that mimic melancholy and discontent. Yet even these are culturally branded, bounded sanctuaries—designed to feel outsiderish without ever genuinely stepping outside. They exist to perform alienation, not to live it—to its edges. Because if they did, they would discover that the only true sanctuary is the one for those few who see sanctuary itself as a lie.”
― Sov8840

“There exists a culture shared even by those who are dissatisfied with mass culture, and it is among the most dangerous precisely because it is dazzling—deceptive. It is a culture that belongs to those who are "dissatisfied with the world as it is." This manifests in the following ways: They still carry a certain belief and hope in humanity. If they suffer, they might dream that their suffering will one day “be heard by everyone.” Through their works, they may fantasize about becoming popular. They might romanticize the psychiatric term "trauma." They might aim to "fix and recover" things or people. They might set their minds on leaving a "meaningful impact" and become activists. They might frequently “discuss” on philosophy forums. They might be aiming at “dark vibes.” They might cling to mottos like “forever alone.” They might refer to themselves as "just a random book lover.” They might have interests in “just some random weird stuff.” They might still be screaming into the void. They might try to “prove their depth” publicly. They might refer to themselves as "lost souls" to the point of weariness, even internalizing this very term—coined by the system to reduce by classifying them—implying a form of domesticated rebellion. And so on. These supposed outsiders are actually on the inside, worshipping at the altar of visibility, validation, and vague worldly hope. Their beliefs—“art-as-cure,” “literature-as-refuge,” “activism-as-purpose”—are not radical to the point of exile but packaged and predictable. They don't reject the system; they only ask to be understood within its boundaries. They weep, but with an eye to applause. They write, but always with a publisher in mind. They compose, but just to make money. They mourn, but only to be noticed. They claim detachment, but still speak as if begging to be liked and heard. They imagine themselves as “wild,” but only within the categories that subcultures and language allow. After all, there are two ends to the ruins: on one end, these kinds of “loners” who are still tied to conventional wisdom; and on the other, the utterly unknown, mystic, cosmic, and free spirits who have transcended everything human.”
― Sov8840