Alien World Quotes & Sayings

One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one's path; one then looks up and suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the world in a strangeness, and the more one stares blankly at the world, the stranger it looks, the more hideously frightening it seems. There is then born in one a wild, hot wish to project out upon the alien world the world that one is seeking. This wish is a hunger for power, to be in command of one's self. — Richard Wright

We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans. — Ronald Reagan

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer. — Nema Al-Araby

Consider Ireland ... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question. — Benjamin Disraeli

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

After the successful but disastrous raid on Mount Weather, he's facing the impossible. Katy is gone. Taken. Everything becomes about finding her. Taking out anyone who stands in his way? Done. Burning down the whole world to save her? Gladly. Exposing his alien race to the world? With pleasure. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline. Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. It was a screen of walls and towers pocked with windows. He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers. — Mervyn Peake

The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture. — Karen Armstrong

For what purpose have you prayed?"
"For thanks. If I must die, at least I have lived. If my companions have perished, at least I have known them. If the world is cruel, at least I have tasted kindness. I had to cross to the far side of the sky to taste it but, as you say, the world is full of miracles. — Michael Flynn

When I'd woken the next morning, I'd done so in a dislocated world of dimmed daylight and diluted colors, a sodden world, feeling like I was a castaway on an alien planet. — Keith Houghton

I wonder if it will be - can be - any more beautiful than this,' murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom 'home' must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars. — L.M. Montgomery

In alien lands I keep the body
Of ancient native rites and things:
I gladly free a little birdie
At celebration of the spring.
I'm now free for consolation,
And thankful to almighty Lord:
At least, to one of his creations
I've given freedom in this world! — Alexander Pushkin

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities are closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate-We are America! — Carlos Bulosan

I was wowed by Margo Jefferson's memoir, Negroland, which is about growing up black and privileged in Chicago in the fifties and sixties. It was a window into an alien world. Obviously, I'm not black, but what was really alien to me was her family's focus on respectability. I was never taught when to wear white gloves, what length skirt is appropriate. — Justine Larbalestier

The children I describe here have horizontal conditions that are alien to their parents. They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender. The timeworn adage says that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that a child resembles his or her parents; these children are apples that have fallen elsewhere - some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world. Yet myriad families learn to tolerate, accept, and finally celebrate children who are not what they originally had in mind. — Andrew Solomon

...Perhaps New York's unintentional beauty is much richer and more varied than the excessively strict and composed beauty of human design. But it's not our European beauty. It's an alien world. — Milan Kundera

The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society ... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself. — Thomm Quackenbush

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness. — Theodor Adorno

We need to enact a strong standard that will stop a terrorist or illegal alien from getting a driver's license because border security is a major concern in a post-September 11th world. — Bill Shuster

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me. — Salman Rushdie

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. — Arthur C. Clarke

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or 'de-minded'. — Istvan Aranyosi

Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored. — Heinrich Hertz

[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail. — Richard Hofstadter

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself
he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. — Kevin Brockmeier

As I reach the grand foyer, I see Jean-Baptiste and Gaspard step through the front door.
"You're here!" I cry.
"I had planned on taking a couple more hours to rest up," Gaspard explains with a grin, "however, we received this almost indecipherable text message on our mobile telephone ... "
Jean-Baptiste holds up his cell phone like it's a piece of alien machinery. "And I quote, 'Dudes, it's going down now. Get your sorry asses over here stat.' With such an eloquent request, how could we resist?" he remarks drily. But there is a ghost of a smile at the edge of his lips, and I know that he and Gaspard wouldn't miss this for anything in the world. — Amy Plum

The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. — Greg Iles

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.
Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.
The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.
Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain. — Judith A. Wright

The aloof nature of autism leads to many misconceptions about the mind of individuals on the spectrum. Labeled as "being in a world of their own" is one of the absolute worst. Difficulty with communication and social interaction does not mean one is alien. Lack of eye contact does not mean they can't see. Wandering does not mean they are lost. — Liz Becker

It's a strange world"
"The strangest — Stephenie Meyer

It was an alien place, as much inhuman as it was ungodly. There was no life in this place. It was a different world altogether.
This world was dead. — Angelo Tsanatelis

I am indeed a kind of alien," siad Momo. "Your legends do not entirely miss the mark. We do have ray guns and flying saucers. But my homeland is not one of your space's planets. I'm from the All, Joe Cube. A world of four dimensions. I climbed down through a tunnel to get to Spaceland- to your world. Spaceland lies in an endless cavern like a strange, subterranean sea. Spaceland very nearly lacks a fourth dimension; it extends less than a nanometer in the direction of your vinn and vout- which actually point in the direction of our up and down. Spaceland appears to us as something like a rug- but unlike a rug, Spsaceland is cunningly filled with motion and life. It seems the Creator put Spaceland in place to separate the All in two. My people the Kluppers, live up above it, and another fold called the Dronners live down below. They are our enemies, hidden below Spaceland." Momo paused, as if agitated by the thought of the Dronners. "You'll turn the tide against them Joe. — Rudy Rucker

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy ... .The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities ... To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. — G.K. Chesterton

An alien landing would unify the world, just like in a science fiction movie. But "angels" had the potential to splinter humanity into a thousand sharp shards. — Laini Taylor

When the Labor Department is forced to relent and let these visitors do this work it is of course all legal. But it makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the field for lack of harvesters. — Ronald Reagan

A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,' she said, 'and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America. — Manu Joseph

All this sea of humanity reassured me that as alien as i felt, there were always others in the world far odder than I — Richard C. Morais

We must never again let America be led into a fratricidal war like the last two world wars, for the sake of alien, minority interests. — George Lincoln Rockwell

Philosophers view the world to a certain extent in the same way as do alien beings or children. Everything is always completely new. They mistrust strongly ingrained judgments, and, yes, they even mistrust the scientific claims of experts. — Markus Gabriel

I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. — Ronald Reagan

One has to be realistic. One's concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That's very important. — Amartya Sen

In a world of fog and gray, the youth is a shining being dressed in dark violet, his golden-flecked hair smoothed back from his bronzed temples. He resembles a human, but no man I have ever seen holds himself like a king, like a gleaming statue chiseled from topaz.
I swallow. I am standing before a demon, the most beautiful being I have ever seen, and I can't run. I can only stand in the hushed glade and stare, snowflakes falling in the space between us. — Heather Heffner

She was, he knew- and had known very early, he supposed- one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled. Alien to the world, it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise. It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could only withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small and gently still. — John Edward Williams

Do not expect me to fall in with the evil customs and ways of the world. I am in Rome, but I will not do as Rome does. I am an alien, a stranger, and a foreigner. My citizenship is in heaven. — Billy Graham

Only a few miles from any city centre one would find oneself already in the backwoods, where there were bandits living in the forests, where roads turned into muddy bogs in spring, and where the external signs of life in the remote hamlets had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. Yet, despite living so close to the peasants, the educated classes of the cities knew next to nothing about their world. It was as exotic and alien to them as the natives of Africa were to their distant colonial rulers. — Orlando Figes

It wasn't like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar. It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch. — Brenna Yovanoff

Just thinking about that, if that were to really happen, if an alien were to come down and really abduct you, how terrifying and how earth-shattering would that be? Your whole world is just destroyed. God is destroyed. It's kind of a fascinating thing to think about. — Evan Peters

Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war? — Ronald Reagan

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. — Joseph Brodsky

How can what is not only dead and gone, but remote and sometimes alien, have any practical bearing on today's world? The answer is that, paradoxically, the value of the past lies precisely in what is different from our world. By giving us another vantage point, it enables us to look at our own circumstances with sharper vision, alert to the possibility that they might have been different, and that they will probably turn out differently in the future. — John Tosh

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about
Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?
we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were. — Marilynne Robinson

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it's a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag. — Jeremy Clarkson

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth. — James E. Lovelock

Everything in this world was so new, so wonderful and strange
like things in my old world, but better []For sixteen years my soul had been drawn towards this place, this alien homeland, toward its rainbow sunrises and whispering trees
Breena Bitter Frost (on the brink of discovery; about why she never quite felt like she belonged in the land over the Crystal River) — Kailin Gow

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[ ... ]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards "Them" (i.e., anyone who is not one of "Us") is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. — Zeena Schreck

The old masters said if you met another Buddha on the road, you should kill him. All reality is an illusion: if you think you've found the incarnation of enlightenment, destroy that illusion on the spot. But the real world is real. Therefore, if you meet a bandit on the road, you should kill him. Anyone who seeks to make a bad world worse is a monster and an alien. — Edward W. Robertson

When the subjects are not "in flow" theyencountertheworld as resistant, as blocking rather than enabling an action. Unhappy subjects hence feel alienated from the world as they experience the world as alien — Anonymous

She knew she had changed too, but not as they had changed, and it puzzled her. She sat and watched them and she felt herself an alien among them, as alien and lonely as if she had come from another world, speaking a language they did not understand and she not understanding theirs. — Margaret Mitchell

Generally speaking, if a guy breaks your jaw and leg and cuts off your robotic arm, you file charges and get a restraining order. The only exception is when subtle machinations are needed to save the world from a massive, catastrophic alien takeover. But in no other circumstance. — Shannon Hale

The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men. — Seneca.

Mimbrates are the bravest people in the world
probably because they don't have brains enough to be afraid of anything. Garion's friend Mandorallen is totally convinced that he's invincible."
"He is," Ce'Nedra said in automatic defense of her knight. "I saw him kill a lion once with his bare hands."
" ... I heard him suggest to Barak and Hettar once that the three of them attack an entire Tolnedran legion."
"Perhaps he was joking."
"Mimbrate knights don't know how to joke," Silk told him.
"I will not sit here and listen to you people insult my knight," Ce'Nedra said hotly.
"We'renot insulting hi, Ce'Nedra," Silk told her. "We're describing him. He's so noble he makes my hair hurt."
"Nobility is an alien concept to a Drasnian, I suppose," she noted.
"Not alien, Ce'Nedra. Incomprehensible. — David Eddings

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. — John Richard Stephens

It takes less time for them to conquer the world than it takes for me to brush my teeth. That's pretty disappointing." Jesse from ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES. — Brian Yansky

She liked to think. What did she like to think? She was having a dumb day and wanted to blame the fog.
Maybe he falls, he slides, if that is a useful word, from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction - he slides into her experience, everyone's, the standard sun-kissed chronology of events.
Am I the first human to abduct an alien? — Don DeLillo

Sacred scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expressed itself in terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. Any other teaching about the origin and makeup of the universe is so alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven. — Pope John Paul II

The enlightened rational man is not unlike the title character in Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni": a likeable rake, intelligent and enterprising, free to do as he pleases, outmaneuvering his honorable, tradition-bound adversaries at every step. One cannot begrudge him his liberty and pursuit of happiness, but looming large above him is his fatal flaw: his mind's maturity does not match his freedom. His pursuits are frivolous, tawdry and destructive. And this, we maintain, is the historical moment of our techno-scientific world: like some allegorical alien race in a science fiction story, we have placed broad freedoms and enormous power in the hands of a flawed creature: ourselves. Empirical reason has brought us here, and by its light we will have to find a way forward. — Danko Antolovic

The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live
undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are
my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks
we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. — Oscar Wilde

Logic is our assurance," MacDonald said calmly. "The only thing worth sending from star to star is information, and the certain profit from such an exchange far outweighs the uncertain advantage from any other kind of behavior. The first benefit is the knowledge of other intelligent creatures in the universe - this alone gives us strength and courage. Then comes information from an alien world; it is like having our own instruments there, even our own scientists, to measure and record, only with the additional advantage of a breadth and duration of measurements under a variety of conditions. Finally comes the cultural and scientific knowledge and development of another race, and the treasure to be gained from this kind of exchange is beyond calculation. — James Edwin Gunn

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

The idea of regularly acknowledging our indebtedness to the natural world and giving thanks for the many gifts we receive from it, or considering other species to be our close "relations" which many indigenous peoples still do, couldn't be more alien to most of us. — Charlie Cook

Ultimately, all I wanted was for players to feel like they were in the real world. I wanted them to be able to apply real world common sense to the problems confronting them, and I thought recreating real world locations would encourage that kind of thinking. There's also just a real power, a real thrill, when you fire up a game and see a place you've been or want to go, and then get to do all the stuff you WANT to do there but know you'll get arrested if you try! If that isn't the stuff of fantasy - far more than exploring some goofy dwarven mine or alien spaceship - I don't know what is! — Warren Spector

Feral beauty tangled up and over every surface. Enormous vines and flourishing blooms swathed the area creating a shadowy, organic cathedral. A faint whiff of perfume breezed to her, like jasmine, but sweeter, more delicate - if jasmine could be more delicate without losing its scent entirely. The buzzing of alien insects reminded her of the sticky, summer days of her childhood in the South, and cicadas filled her memory with their incessant mating calls. Here, however, the insects grew louder as it grew darker. It seemed even they understood the dangers of daylight. — Jacqueline Patricks

On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity actually derives less from our indifference or hostility than from our clumsiness and awkwardness when we leave the comfort of the English language behind ... [V]enturing outside the bounds of the English language exercises and stretches our minds in ways that are essential for getting as close as we can to the act of seeing the world from what would otherwise remain unfamiliar and alien perspectives. — Patricia Nelson Limerick

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper. — Angela Carter

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for he vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world. — Hassan Blasim

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand - a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear - while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again? — Karl Marx

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the "developed" and the latter as the "developing" world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of "development" are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of "development"? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more "developed" than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter? — Vinoth Ramachandra

In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage. — Joseph O'Neill

In other words, Hitler's soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him. During the following six months during a series of irregular meetings and discussions with Hitler, Walter Stein was to witness a maturing soul development in this enigmatic character through which he became more and more a conscious and responsive tool of the world-shattering purposes of the demonic Spirit which overshadowed him. 'I move like a sleep-walker where Providence dictates,' said Adolf Hitler at a press interview. — Trevor Ravenscroft

Jesus, this world, this world. I feel so heartsick. I cannot even retch.

And I dream of that awful board, piled with tokens moving each other by their own secret rules. A game of alien powers but those powers escape the game to move among us. They roam the world cow-eyed and compassionate and offer hands with fingers like fishhooks. We live in a paddock, a fattening pen, and we cannot leave it, because when we try to go the hooks say, Think of who you'll hurt.

So much hurt to try to heal. And the healing hurts too much. — Seth Dickinson

When I learned that aliens really do exist, I wasn't too surprised. But what did shock me when I started investigating extra-terrestrial reports a decade ago is the extent to which the proof has been hushed up. It isn't just the US government which has kept quiet about alien visits. It would be arrogant of an American like myself to assume that ETs would only choose to visit my country. Indeed, I've heard convincing stories about governments all over the world that know of alien visits - including the British government. — Edgar Mitchell

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts. — Cormac McCarthy

The result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien,
and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda — Alan W. Watts

The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. — G.K. Chesterton

I love science fiction but I don't like fantastic [cinema]. For example, if you have a magical ring and you can explode the world with it. What are we talking about? You know, it's not interesting. I don't like Lord of the Rings. Even Star Wars, for me, I don't understand this kind of story. But Alien, because the rules of the game are very precise, it could happen. I love science fiction. I have an idea about robots in the future. — Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Then there is that other appeal, the stronger one, of spending, during certain parts of the year, a ten- or twelve- hour working day with bees, which are, when all is said and done, simply a bunch of bugs. But spending my days in close and intimate contact with creatures who are structured so differently from humans, and who get on with life in such a different way, is like being a visitor in an alien but ineffably engaging world. — Sue Hubbell

You have business and pleasure to attend to. As an expert in both, allow me to advise you to put them aside for the next ten minutes. Why?

"Because the world is about to transform, and you will want to be able to say you saw it happen. The axes of our little universe are about to flip, and you'll want to get your magboots set. — G.S. Jennsen

How do you know Hollywood is getting serious about video games? They want to make one of their own. In 'Defiance,' the remaining humans on Earth, as well as alien species looking for a new home, find themselves settling for peace after a massive war desecrated the world and destroyed most of the alien ships along with it. — Rob Manuel

Once, at the dreaming dawn of history
before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other
fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other. — Colin Thubron

The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time. — Rick Yancey

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world — Maria Montessori

A good SciFi Author shows you an alien world; a great one takes you there. — Ray Jay Perreault

They'd pretended - all of them faking, denying, lying - that they weren't counting the seconds until leave was over and it was back out there into that world of yellow dust, that alien planet where the only color was death. — Cole McCade

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. — Donna Tartt

You're a poem?' I repeated.
She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.'
'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?'
'What's your name?'
'Enn.'
'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time? — Neil Gaiman

Her world is alien to the horrors I know. All the child sees is love. — Pierce Brown

It's the 50th year of Doctor Who and look what's going on! We're up in the sky and under the sea! We're running round the rings of an alien world and then a haunted house. There's new Cybermen, new Ice Warriors and a never before attempted journey to the centre of the TARDIS. And in the finale, the Doctor's greatest secret will at last be revealed! If this wasn't already our most exciting year it would be anyway! — Steven Moffat

Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a 'realistic' tale. Then a gradual - or it may be sometimes a shockingly abrupt - change becomes apparent, and the reader begins to realize that what is being described is alien to the world he is accustomed to, that something strange has crept or leapt into it. This strangeness changes the world permanently and fundamentally. — Franz Rottensteiner

We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam. — Hannah Lillith Assadi