Outsiders Quotes

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

~ Audre Lorde

If you feel like you don't fit into the world you inherited it is because you were born to help create a new one.

~ Ross Caligiuri

To completely understand me you must first accept that I am not you.

~ Ross Caligiuri

My dream is to create something so beautiful that it encourages people to present the best version of themselves to me everywhere I go.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Eternity will not cause our memories to fade, it will force our hearts to accept the past.

~ Ross Caligiuri

To struggle against the weight of sleep as reality eclipses the moon of your dreams is the purest sign of true love.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Cherish your existence, for memories become legacies and life can change in an instant.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Try to think of it as though we are rewriting history––the first time this experience occurred you and I never kissed in this Dream Machine room. But now when we leave here, and open our eyes again near the wall around the center of Constance, that kiss will be included in our memories of the day we first met. We could spend a lifetime recreating this moment here, meanwhile, not a single second of our lives would slip by back in our reality. Time seems to move differently inside of our memories.

~ Ross Caligiuri

As her feet beat the concrete ground beneath them, her chest began to ache. It had been a long time since she had run at a full sprint. She was, quite literally, running for her life, and leaving everything she had known before behind. Regardless of her past experiences, here she was, blindly following a girl, who was virtually a stranger, because she had promised to lead Eleanor to safety.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Eleanor had heard talk of the rebellion that existed inside the city of Constance before. Most of the information she gathered was considered an old fairy tale by the general public. There were a few stories here and there about people angered by their present living conditions, who had demanded that the center of Constance be held responsible for it. However, information was never passed between the five different sectors. Over the years the tales of the rebellion had become children’s bedtime stories, and people did not take them seriously.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Here we go,” Phoenix said, turning back to Nora. “Try not to let this room scare you.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Every decision you make in life will stem from one of two options: love or fear. Choose love.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.That includes women. Most especially women ...To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.

~ Leymah Gbowee

We of alien looks or words must stick together.

~ C.j. Sansom

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.

~ Jamake Highwater

I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that...

~ David Mitchell

But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it's like to be different.

~ Celeste Ng

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.

~ David Brooks

I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals.The Panopticon

~ Jenn Fagan

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

~ Peter Høeg

That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.

~ Catherine Lacey

Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.” So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

~ Eleanor Catton

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I’m a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki

~ Andrew James Pritchard

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

The cafeteria made him feel like an observer rather than a participant in the high school experience.

~ Alexandra Robbins

the code of a world he'd never been invited to join.

~ Andrew Kaufman

There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.

~ Tove Jansson

He felt as if there were something missing inside him that didn't fit in with their merriment, with their willing ignorance of the world outside the castle. It went beyond his title. He had enjoyed their company early in his adolescence, but it had become apparent that he'd always be a step away. The worst of it was that they didn't seem to notice he was different- or that he felt different. Were it not for Chaol, he would have felt immensely lonely.

~ Sarah J. Maas