Strangeness Quotes

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

“People are strange . . .”
― Jim Morrison

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

“I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It's just whether or not you decide to keep it.”
― Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.”
― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase

“Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.

Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.

Some, downright weird.

But then again, you’d have to be.

To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.”
― Christopher Hopper

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Perhaps we only leave
So we may once again arrive,
To get a bird's eye view
Of what it means to be alive.
For there is beauty in returning,
Oh how wonderful, how strange,
To see that everything is different
But know it's only you who's changed.”
― Erin Hanson

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”
― Alain de Botton

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run

“Normal....
What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.
So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?
Would our normal, become our new wierd?”
― Catherine

“Ah, sweetie. If the poets couldn’t unriddle them, then you certainly can’t. Be kind, and keep your ears on offer if she wants to talk. But you can’t draw out the strangeness, Edgar. It’s not a poison.”
― Allyse Near, Fairytales for Wilde Girls

“In my family strange is relative.”
― Kate Rockland, Falling Is Like This

“I look and I look...
I must have come to the wrong planet.
It's so strange here.”
― Sigbjørn Obstfelder

“I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle, occurring everywhere, without end, forever.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The strangenesses are multiplying, he wrote in his article, though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it's difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together, /
More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy; / But, howsoever, strange and admirable”
― William Shakespeare, Midsummer-Night's Dream. Love's Labor's Lost. Merchant of Venice. as You Like It. All's Well That Ends Well. Taming of the Shrew

“We live in strange and marvelous times.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller

“If you see someone who protects the umbrella from getting wet in the rain, instead of protecting herself, it is very strange, but it is this strangeness, this different behaviour that will make you think! Someone who opens her umbrella and protects herself in the rain does teach you nothing!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Strangeness is not vice.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gentle Spirit

“चलो इक बार फिर से अजनबी बन जाएँ हम दोनों।

न मैं तुम से कोई उम्मीद रखूँ दिल-नवाज़ी की।
न तुम मेरी तरफ़ देखो ग़लत-अंदाज़ नज़रों से।
न मेरे दिल की धड़कन लड़खड़ाए मेरी बातों से।

न ज़ाहिर हो तुम्हारी कश्मकश का राज़ नज़रों से।
तुम्हें भी कोई उलझन रोकती है पेश-क़दमी से।
मुझे भी लोग कहते हैं कि ये जल्वे पराए हैं।
मिरे हमराह भी रुस्वाइयाँ हैं मेरे माज़ी की।

तुम्हारे साथ भी गुज़री हुई रातों के साए हैं।
तआ'रुफ़ रोग हो जाए तो उस का भूलना बेहतर।
तअ'ल्लुक़ बोझ बन जाए तो उस को तोड़ना अच्छा।
वो अफ़्साना जिसे अंजाम तक लाना न हो मुमकिन
उसे इक ख़ूबसूरत मोड़ दे कर छोड़ना अच्छा।

चलो इक बार फिर से अजनबी बन जाएँ हम दोनों।”
― Sahir Ludhianvi

“You two are the oddest family I have ever seen."

"That's all a family is: space to be odd.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“A place outside time. This is the phrase I overhear my husband using as he tries to describe Florida to his father over the phone. His father lives in a high-rise condo in New Jersey, and he is concerned that we are still down here. On the news, there is constant talk about Florida’s post-pandemic spiral. Speculation about whether the state is experiencing an ecological and spiritual succession. There is talk about militias creeping out of the swamp. There is talk of vandals. There is talk of literal highway robbery. (Our Cro-Magnon governor denies any of this is happening, even though there are reports that some of these forces are amassing in his name.) For the time being, I can ghostwrite my books and shop specials at the grocery and take my niece to the water park, but no one knows how much longer this version of our world will last. “Sometimes I can’t believe a place like this exists,” my husband says as we speed down a gleaming white limestone road that cuts through a palm forest, or ride an airboat around a swollen lake. Florida has a past, as all places do, but these days everyone is uncertain about its future.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“My husband is nervous about a lot of things down here, like the monstrous size of the fire ants and the quality of the gasoline, because half the time the gas stations are out, the nozzles bundled up in black garbage bags, or the credit card readers don't work or the attendant is a shirtless man with a hip flask tucked into the waistband of his shorts. I keep trying to explain that this is a place with its own laws.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise