Otherness Quotes - Page 2

• I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

  Mary Oliver

  Book, Heart, Character

  Mary Oliver (2016). “Upstream: Selected Essays”, p.14, Penguin

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• Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

  Jodie Foster

  Live Life, Character, Bigs

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• Pack the one bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: passeport, ticket, book, taxi, airport, check-in, beer, announcement, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, air born, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, read, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, descent, circling, touch down, earth, unfasten seat-belt, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, questions, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, fatigue, life.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Stars, Loneliness, Book

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• Through itself the soul arrives at all harmony that is perceptible in otherness-just as through what is internal the soul arrives at what is external.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Soul, Harmony, Internals

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• Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.

  Anna Quindlen

  Girl, Country, Silly

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• Death, like the quintessence of otherness, is for others.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Quintessence

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• I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Book, Self

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• It's simple ... go the extra mile and you will stand out from the crowd

  Robin Crow

  Motivational, Simple, Excellence

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• By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this - if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural - then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

  William Cronon

  Environmental, Firsts, Ordinary

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• For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

  Joy Williams

  Beautiful, Song, Eye

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.123, Rowman & Littlefield

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• You need a strong sense of 'otherness' to be able to create in your life.

  Amos Lee

  Strong, Needs, Able

  "Exclusive: Amos Lee Gets Personal". Interview, www.seventeen.com. January 26, 2011.

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• I think as women, you know, if you are considered a pioneer in these things, you can get really distracted by these other things - you know, people's demands of you reflecting on your otherness. And for this white critic to say, "I don't understand why she doesn't do that" - and you're like, "It's because I'm running a show on a major network and I want the show to continue" - and to sort of guilt me.

  Mindy Kaling

  Running, Thinking, White

  "Mindy Kaling On Refusing To Be An Outsider And Sexism On Set". www.wbur.org. October 16, 2014.

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• I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.

  Neil Gaiman

  Thinking, Inclusion

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• One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.

  Mark Epstein

  Love, Opportunity, Ego

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.58, Penguin

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• White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

  Adrienne Rich

  Hate, Passion, White

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• Otherness cannot be a form. For to alter is to deform rather than to form. Therefore, that which is seen in different things can also be seen in and of itself without otherness, since otherness did not give being to it.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Giving, Different, Form

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• Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.

  David Abram

  Eye, Skins, Ears

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.9, Vintage

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• Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

  Lynne Truss

  Imagination, Together, Mystery

  "Character studies" by Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2007.

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• Black and white is much closer to the condition of
  dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was
  part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.

  John Boorman

  Dream, Black And White, Thinking

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• The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.

  Yann Martel

  Sex, Crazy, Men

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God

  Charles Williams

  Love, Mean, Emotional

  Charles Williams (2016). “He Came Down From Heaven”, p.11, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

  Octavio Paz

  Soul, Desire, Noble

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• I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.

  Brian Froud

  Space, Giving, Depth

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• I think that it's insidious to be spending more of your time reflecting and talking about panels, and talking more and more in smart ways about your otherness, rather than doing the hard work of your job.

  Mindy Kaling

  Jobs, Smart, Hard Work

  "Mindy Kaling On Refusing To Be An Outsider And Sexism On Set". www.wbur.org. October 16, 2014.

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• God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.

  David Bentley Hart

  Distance, Desire, Delight

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