#outsider

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things. ↗

— Peter Bogdanovich

#dorothy-swenson #irony #outsider #beauty

The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself. ↗

— Colin Wilson

#lostness #the-outsider #business

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

#outsider #art

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

#lonely #out-of-place #outcast #outsider #lonely

End Of Men is a concoction of sex, outsider art, filmmaking and death including an Italian island ↗

— C. B. Murphy

#filmmaking #outsider-art #sex #art

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another. ↗

— Alan Cumming

#feel #felt #hard #i #i think

Because I have success, it doesn't mean I'm part of the mainstream. I'm still an outsider. ↗

— Matt Drudge

#i #mainstream #mean #outsider #part

It's not like I didn't do anything for 10 years and chose a new profession. I've been on the ice a lot. I'm not an outsider. ↗

— Katarina Witt

#been #chose #i #ice #like

Pretty much everywhere I go, I'm pretty much thinking I'm going to be bounced. I am still the outsider who snuck into the party. I identify with the regular person, because that is who I am. ↗

— Kathy Griffin

#because #bounced #everywhere #go #going

I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music. ↗

— Janis Ian

#because #black #called #charles #coolest