Quotes & Sayings About Eccentrics

Ordinary people, caught in the trap of their routine lives, are not villains any more than eccentrics or rebels are villains. Essentially, both kinds of people are struggling to be good, through a maze of conflicts and a haze of shadows. — Sydney J. Harris

Others as well had come to see them as more than mere eccentrics. Life on the Outer Banks was harsh. Making ends meet was a constant struggle. Hard workers were greatly admired and in the words of John T. Daniels, the Wrights were "two of the workingest boys" ever seen, "and when they worked, they worked. . . . They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing. — David McCullough

Schools that cannot tolerate interesting & enthusiastic eccentrics who work better alone than together are devoid of flexibility & spirit — Andy Hargreaves

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring. — Jon Ronson

We are all on the same road, some ahead of us and some behind. We do not always recognize ourselves as being among those who are struggling farther back, and misunderstand, scorn, and even persecute the ones who move ahead of us. History is littered with such as these: eccentrics, geniuses, idealists among those most noticeable. These change the world by force, though the change most often does not take place during their own time, they are so far ahead of it and therefore so rarely understood. — Nell Gavin

I like it when people make an effort to wear things that you wouldn't normally put together - I like eccentrics. — Bat For Lashes

Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ. — Kenneth Rexroth

Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months we've noticed the most heartening appearance all over the place of eccentrics, more or less raving lunatics, cranks, and reinvigorating crackpots. — Jacques Yonnet

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Laguna prided itself on being an artist's colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them. — Dean Koontz

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. — Louise Erdrich

I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics . — Michael Stipe

On the one hand, there are people known as straight, regular, square (and there are also cubes and tesseracts), classified, degreed, graduated, and moneyed, who live in little boxes made of ticky-tacky, cultivate lawn order, and want to get things ironed out in nothing flat. On the other, there are bohemians, nuts, bums, freaks, eccentrics, beatifics, whollymen, courtesans, vagrants, and hippies (a name which ought to have something to do with the dangerous curves of women's hips), who want to experience the universe in a groovy, swinging, ecstatic, syncopated, rock-and-rolling, mind-blown, turned-on, and far-out way. — Alan W. Watts

New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it's just one - a really rich one - with big tall glass buildings. — Chris Noth

We're all eccentrics. We're nine prima donnas. — Harry A. Blackmun

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge. — Rose Macaulay

I nowadays have the feeling that not only are most bookmen are eccentrics, but even the act they support
reading
is itself an eccentricity now, if a mild one. Interrupted narrative has become a natural thing. One could argue that Dickens and the other popular, serially published nineteenth-century novelists started this, and the television commercial made interruption come to seem normal. But the silicon chip has accelerated the process of interruption beyond all reckoning: iPods, Blackberries, laptops all break narrative into shorter and shorter sequences. — Larry McMurtry

Well, they're queer; but they're all very old, and so they're bound to be. But they're not mental,' explained Mother; adding candidly, 'Anyway, not enough to be put away. — Gerald Durrell

What do they mean to you?" he asked, leaning back into the portable thicket of his gray vested suit. Beverly took back her pages and studied them. After a while, she looked up. "They mean to me that the universe . . . growls, and sings. No, shouts." The learned astronomer was shocked. In dealing with the public he was often confronted by lunatics and visionaries, some of whose theories were elegant, some absurd, and some, perhaps, right on the mark. But those were usually old bearded men who lived in lofts crowded with books and tools, eccentrics who walked around the city, pushing carts full of their belongings, madmen from state institutions that could not hold them. There was always something arresting and true about their thoughts, as if their lunacy were as much a gift as an affliction, though the heavy weight of the truth they sensed so strongly had clouded their reason, and all the wonder in what they said was shattered and disguised. He — Mark Helprin

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world. — John Berendt

I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I think London's sexy because it's so full of eccentrics. — Rachel Weisz

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps. — Marilyn Johnson

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.) — Isaac Asimov

My fantasy was that I was the long-lost switched-at-birth child of wealthy eccentrics. One day, they would find me and take me away from the gypsy caravan that was my life, and give me hot meals, a decent dress, and a pony. — Roberta Pearce

I'm much more interested in lesser-known eccentrics and characters and performers. Like Matthew Buchinger, who was born in Germany in 1674, had no arms or legs and yet did magic, and had 14 kids, and made the most extraordinary calligraphy. — Ricky Jay

The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door. — Julian Clary

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. — Germaine Greer

It's always nice when the eccentrics show up. — Alex Cox

We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity. — Thomas Ligotti

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way. — Adam Mansbach

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists? — Alfred Kazin

Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room. — Elizabeth McCracken

. . . I spent much of my youth wondering about the verticality of my own biological progenitors. So that when I reached the age of majority, I set out to discover who they were, only to uncover a shameful parade of bastards, miscreants, and foolhardy eccentrics — Gary Anderson

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending. — Saul Bellow

Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress. — Gelett Burgess

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another. — Gerald Durrell

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. — Edith Sitwell

We are all eccentrics in our dreams. Lunatics, even. — Jonathan Hull

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes. — Sara Sheridan

There's a fine line between eccentrics and geniuses. If you're a little ahead of your time, you're an eccentric, and if you're too late, you're a failure, but if you hit it right on the head, you're a genius. — Thomas Watson Jr.

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. — Pankaj Mishra

It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. — G.K. Chesterton

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish. — Quentin Crisp

Without knowing it, I was acquiring that haughty bearing which is characteristic of so many eccentrics. What other expression would you expect to find on the face of anyone who knows that if he turns his head too quickly, he will see on the faces of others glares of stark terror or grimaces of hatred? Aloofness is the posture of self-defense. — Quentin Crisp

People like eccentrics. Therefore they will leave me alone, saying that I am a mad clown. — Vaslav Nijinsky

These stories have a dark side. Outsiders and eccentrics are regarded with suspicion, tortured, even killed. The major theme that emerges is of families diminished by conflict; almost a generation of adult males appears to be missing. Their absence is balanced by a number of strong female presences. This also reflects the dominance of women in the Acehnese household.

Azhari is a master of suspense. He wastes no words; his narration is sparse. The overall atmosphere of the stories in Nutmeg Woman is tense and anxious. If there is a message, it is a plea for peace and tolerance and an end to bloodshed and oppression. — Heather Curnow

Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionary. — Jenny Holzer

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest, — William O. Douglas

When I asked my father why Mademoiselle Finkelstein was such a cruel woman, he said it was because she was unmarried, which caused women to be come bitter, harsh, and unforgiving after they reached the age of thirty. of course, he explained, they made wonderful teachers, because they had the unfettered time to dedicate to their profession and they knew how to instill discipline. on the other hand, unmarried men, like his younger brother, Uncle Jihad, were simply eccentrics and did not suffer accordingly. The difference, he elaborated, was that men chose to be unmarried, whereas women had to live with never having been chosen. — Rabih Alameddine

Too much of what passes for design now is theater. It's one thing to be eccentric- and by the way, most eccentrics tend to be rather well-educated people - and quite another to be a faddist, by which I mean someone who tries to conjure a totally foreign aesthetic in a misplaced environment ... — Albert Hadley

Sometimes I forget what I look like and I do something out of character, such as sing shepherd tunes in Aramaic while I'm waiting in line at Starbucks, but the nice bit about living in urban America is that people tend to either ignore eccentrics or move to the suburbs to escape them. — Kevin Hearne

Try this." O'Grady smiled. "It's the only thing we drink. It'll warm your insides."
"What is it?" Asked the ever cautious Waldo.
"We call it the Forest Flaming Special. Go ahead-drink up."
"Well, okay...." Waldo lifted the cup and nearly dropped it when saw his name printed clearly on the side.
"We've been expecting you." Explained Fred, beginning to laugh. — Donald Jeffries

And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people - there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy. — Vladimir Nabokov

Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career. — E.A. Bucchianeri

In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics - both touted and tolerated. — David Grubbs

There's a very fine line between a groove and a rut; a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts. — Christine Lavin

I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course. — Christopher Walken

I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions. — Antonio Tabucchi