Otherness Quotes

• She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

  Joanne Harris

  Eye, Thoughtful, Looks

  Joanne Harris (2009). “The Girl with No Shadow: A Novel”, p.28, Harper Collins

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• The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.

  Anna Quindlen

  Brother, Gay, Racism

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• Any ideas of “other” are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of “normal.”

  Meshell Ndegeocello

  Ideas, Normal, Complicated

  "Meshell Ndegeocello And Toshi Reagon Discuss Civil Rights, A Modern Day Civil War, And More". Interview with Toshi Reagon, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 14, 2012.

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• When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Equality, Unique, Differences

  D. H. Lawrence, Michael Herbert (1988). “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays”, p.80, Cambridge University Press

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• To love is to recognize yourself in another. The others "otherness" then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Love Is, Illusion, Form

  Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.74, Penguin

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• We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

  Tim O'Brien

  Wall, Forever, Wish

  Tim O'Brien (2006). “In the Lake of the Woods”, p.110, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Giving, Selfishness

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

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• All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Heart, Empathy, Cry

  Elizabeth Goudge (2012). “The White Witch”, p.427, Hachette UK

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• I'm often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.

  Mona Hatoum

  People, Identity, Culture

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• Mother of otherness, Eat me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Mother

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, Faber & Faber

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• The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Art, Reality, First Impression

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• We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology however frank and open our behaviour we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Spiritual, Mean, Men

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• And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Stars, Distance

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• In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.

  Jean Houston

  Love Is, Practice, Humanity

  "Soul Speaking and Truth Telling: A Conversation with Jean Houston". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.awaken.com. August 23, 2013.

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• Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: "Be not afraid." Though the traditions vary widely in the ways they propose to take us beyond fear, all hold out the same hope: we can escape fear's paralysis and enter a state of grace where encounters with otherness will not threaten us but will enrich our work and our lives.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Spiritual, Fear, Effort

  Parker J. Palmer (2012). “The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life”, p.58, John Wiley & Sons

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• The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange
  voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body,
  another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches,
  sings the unknown. It calls to me.

  Octavio Paz

  Inspiration, Men, Voice

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• To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

  Aldous Huxley

  Animal, Reality, Goal

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

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• I think there's an interesting line drawn towards extreme environments, and the way I define extreme is through a sense of otherness. Or foreignness.

  Tavares Strachan

  Thinking, Interesting, Lines

  "Tavares Strachan's desert explosion" by Matt Mullen, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 1, 2017.

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• Enlightenment is the realization of the oneness of being, where otherness disappears.

  Sharon Gannon

  Oneness, Enlightenment, Realization

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• You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

  Martin Amis

  Heart, Two, Soul

  FaceBook post by Martin Amis from Feb 21, 2013

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• Love is the very process of passing over, of transformation, of stepping outside the limitations of fallen humanity - in which we are all separated from one another and ultimately impenetrable to one another - into an infinite otherness.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Faith, Inspiration, Love Is

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• I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

  C. S. Lewis

  Morning, Grief, Cutting

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.27, Faber & Faber

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• It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Hatred, Form, Lows

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• In the Spirit which draws us into honest engagement with one another, including those who may be very different from us in various ways, God calls us to wake up and learn how to love and respect one another, period.

  Carter Heyward

  Love, God, Respect

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• The childlike, gum-chewing naivete, the glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones . . .

  Andy Warhol

  Self, Despair, Skins

  Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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