outsider experience Quotes

I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.

When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.

I know the dark delight of being strange, The penalty of difference in the crowd, The loneliness of wisdom among fools.

I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

Always being the outsider, you... feel comfortable everywhere, but you don't really feel at home anywhere. I definitely draw comedy from that.

I do know what it's like to be an outsider.

I was an outsider. I looked different, and I felt really voiceless as a kid.

I'm creating art that can be healing. Art that can make you feel like you're not alone, like you're not an outsider. Art that is useful.

A key text for me is James Baldwin's essays. And, in particular, his essay Stranger in the Village. It's a text that I've used in a lot of paintings. The essay is from the mid-'50s, when he's moved to Switzerland to work on a novel, and he finds himself the only black man living in a tiny Swiss village. He even says, "They don't believe I'm American - black people come from Africa." The essay is not only about race relations, but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.

I just really remember the feeling of being a younger comedian who was kind of an outlier for being experimental and weird and how that could feel lonely or hopeless.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.

My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

I was not a punk rocker, absolutely not, but I certainly knew quite a lot of them, and I definitely went to the Mab - it was raw, interesting intense scene, so I was very drawn to it, but I was a total outsider.

My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.

Everybody can relate to being an outsider, having to deal with that, and having to wrestle with how people view them.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.

I think everyone in high school at one point feels like they're on the outside observing what's going on. Even if you're very popular, you have an outsider experience.

Anywhere we go in the States, people know we're from out of town: like, we stick out like sore thumbs. People are like, 'Freaks! Go cut your hair!' and whatever. It's a little weird.

If you create something that is essentially alien to you - as a man - and make a film about woman, the more I can surround myself with woman and combine it with my soul's point of view, the more I become a stranger in a strange land.

I'm not Israeli and because I'm not a citizen, it doesn't matter how often I go there - I'm still not Israeli. There's this way I feel so close to so many people there, but I always feel like I'm staring through the glass. And in a way, having this really thin piece of glass between me and this place is incredibly useful for me as a writer, because I'm just so hyper-aware of it. I could take a walk in San Francisco and probably notice a third of the things that I would notice in Israel, because I'm just attuned to everything when I'm there.

I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.