Quotes & Sayings About Outsiders

Do you like to read?" I asked, pointing at my little shelf.
Moses eyed my books. "Yes."
His answer surprised me. Maybe it was his reputation as a gang banging delinquent. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. But he didn't seem like the type who enjoyed sitting quietly with a book.
"What's your favorite book?" I sounded suspicious and his eyes tightened.
"I like Catcher in the Rye. The Outsiders, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Dune, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings. Anything by Tom Clancy or JK Rowling."
He said JK Rowling quickly, like he didn't want to admit to being a Potter fan. But I was stunned. — Amy Harmon

London has always been a haven for victims of cruelty, and been improved by them. Yet I can see it changing now. Outsiders are demonised, there are little bits of legislation, people are scared. — Emma Thompson

There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman. — Andrea Dworkin

Outsiders often have an insight that an insider doesn't quite have. — Diane Abbott

The outsiders stood always in awe in front of what they had surnamed the Celestial City with Mighty Walls. The great mystery that cloaked its very foundations kept impelling the youth of Crotona, as well as those of the adjacent cities, to seek admittance. In spite of the difficult rules of the Master, curiosity goaded many to venture inside its secrecy, with a passionate aspiration to discover the unknown. Yet, to enroll, young men and women should be introduced by their parents. Sometimes, it was one of the assigned Masters of the Pythagorean Society who assumed the introduction. At the massive wooden gated entrance, one could admire the marble statue of Hermes-Enoch, the father of the spiritual laws. A cubical stone formed its stall where a skillful hand had carved the words: No entry to the vulgar — Karim El Koussa

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases. — James Russell Lowell

Don't trust your own assumptions. Look at your company from functional angles. See where your resources are concentrated. See where your successes are concentrated. Ask informed and intelligent outsiders. — David Braun

Im not a celebrity. I dont take myself too seriously. I know where I stand in the food chain. And no matter how much of an insider I ever become or am, Ill still always be an outsider. — Perez Hilton

So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness. — Alexander McCall Smith

How many times have we brought in an outsider to tell us what we already knew? — Peter Block

No one was interested in Malabo - this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them - why else would he come all this way to live in a hut? Altruism was unknown. Forty years of aid and charities and NGOs had taught them that. Only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa, so Africa punished them for it. — Paul Theroux

The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders. — Sonia Sotomayor

What we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different. — Nick Cave

Pg.1- "I have light brown, almost red hair and greenish-grey eyes. I wish they were more grey, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have."
pg ?- "Can you see the sunset real good from the west side?" She blinked, startled, then smiled. "Real good."
"You can see it from the east side, too," I said quietly.
"Thanks, Ponyboy." She smiled through her tears. "You dig okay."
She had green eyes. I went on, walking home slowly. — S.E. Hinton

I don't feel the pressure by outsiders. I'm not someone who's easily influenced by the public. — Khloe Kardashian

Outsiders develop humor as a defense; why do you think most comedians are gay or Jewish? — Paul Lynde

I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that ... — David Mitchell

The real freedom comes to us when we can learn to go inside and connect with that voice. Then, we're not relying on outsiders. — Echo Bodine

I was always an outsider, proud of being an outsider. I always reveled in the outsiders. — John Zorn

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned. — David Brooks

Working on 'NYPD Blue' and '24', those two series, I did full runs on those. It's great work, but everything has to align. The producers have to want you; the network has to want you; there has to be great writing; and it's not as easy as it may appear to the outsiders to make all those things align. — Ricky Schroder

The issue of homosexuality in the church is complex, highly charged, and defined by misrecognized fears related to rapid social change and the perceived threat to familiar social institutions and the sense of security they represent. Underlying this conflict are the church's historic discomfort with issues of sexuality, and dualistic constructions that codify that unease into categories of sexual insiders (monogamous heterosexuals and celibates) and outsiders (everybody else). These have been magnified in recent years by cultural differences between different generations and African countries where the church has grown. — Jane Ellen Nickell

The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. — Noam Chomsky

Dean bristled at the idea of outsiders on our turf. I completely understood his apprehension. New people tended to want to kill us. I don't know why. We were nice people. — Suzanne M. Sabol

From my perspective, Chinatown was not a place to be feared at all; rather, it was a place to be revered, a place that needed to be protected from outsiders. — Allen Gee

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers. — Karen Russell

Until the arrival of Spanish troops in 1920, Chefchaouen had been visited by just three Westerners. Two were missionary explorers: Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman who spent just an hour in the town in 1883, disguised as a Jewish rabbi, and William Summers, an American who was poisoned by the townsfolk here in 1892. The third, in 1889, was the British journalist Walter Harris, whose main impulse, as described in his book, Land of an African Sultan, was "the very fact that there existed within thirty hours' ride of Tangier a city in which it was considered an utter impossibility for a Christian to enter". Thankfully, Chefchaouen today is more welcoming towards outsiders, and a number of the Medina's newer guesthouses now include owners hailing from Britain, Italy and the former Christian enemy, Spain. — Daniel Jacobs

Somehow even tragedies seem less tragical, when you are the actors in them, than they look to outsiders — Hannah Whitall Smith

Others may want to stand upon the 'politics of identity', or in other words the kind of identification with a particular tradition, or group, or national or ethnic identity that invites them to turn their back on outsiders who question the ways of the group. They will shrug off criticism: their values are 'incommensurable' with the values of outsiders. They are to be understood only by brothers and sisters within the circle. People like to retreat to within a thick, comfortable, traditional set of folkways, and not to worry too much about their structure, or their origins, or even the criticisms that they may deserve. Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind. — Simon Blackburn

Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows. — Noah Feldman

As academics we have pretty good judgment about the quality of institutions that cannot simply be measured by counting the number of papers published or patents received. Outsiders who swoop in to count beans and make up lists based on statistics have little sense of what excellence is. — Henry Rosovsky

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. I read 'The Hobbit' and all of the 'Lord of the Rings' books, but I also read a lot of realism like 'The Outsiders.' — Lisa Papademetriou

Maybe people are younger when they sleep. — S.E. Hinton

Outsiders always look for a reason to explain why they are not inside. They never look in the mirror. Let's face it, the profession I'm in is a very simple and a very cruel one. There is no way that you can create a career for someone without talent and no way to stop a career of someone with talent. — Isaac Stern

MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. — Erik Larson

The scene when Sodapop comes out of the shower in The Outsiders was a very important moment in my adolescence. — Amy Poehler

I wouldn't consider myself an outsider artist because I have a university degree in painting. — Marcel Dzama

You could tell exactly where the popular kids were sitting, the jocks, the drama kids, the band kids, the goths, the kickers, and the other kids who just floated in the middle of it all were, of course, the outsiders. — Rhiannon Frater

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture. — Mark Millar

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophobic on behalf of lots of people. — Bat For Lashes

Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. — Italo Calvino

I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up. — Moby

It's easy to gravitate toward something negative as opposed to something positive, especially if you're an outsider. — Blake Judd

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. — Henry James

People who are feeling bullied and people who feel like outsiders should talk to their parents and guardians about finding a place with likeminded people where they can feel accepted. That's what I needed, and that's what I found with musical theater. — Nick Jonas

I believe young female directors in particular should always remind themselves of the truths of their own stories and not let outsiders influence the authenticity of their films. — Shahad Ameen

Revenge feels right only to those directly involved. Justice feels right even to outsiders. — Marilyn Vos Savant

Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. — David Grann

Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited . But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.

Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the construction of a new and suffocating society.' It is a decisive fight against all societies-christian, democratic, socialist, communist, etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on the stage of history. — Renzo Novatore

As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial. — Anton Chekhov

The wall that separates insiders from outsiders is not born of human nature but methodically built, brick by brick, by tribal convention. The "wall" about which I will often speak in this book is not an organism or a membranous extension of some inborn aspect of "human nature". It is a mechanistic process-a barrier meticulously constructed by erratic community decrees as a means of identifying those who are part of the group and marking those who are not. It is not difficult to imagine the chauvinism that require a community to mark its territories and distinguish its members from its enemies. It is far more difficult to understand the kind of "outsiders" who are the subjects of this book-those who are part of the group and yet are rejected by their peers and cast into a terrible internal exile. It is an exile called "alienation". — Jamake Highwater

Because economists go through a similar training and share a common method of analysis, they act very much like a guild. The models themselves may be the product of analysis, reflection, and observation, but practitioners' views about the real world develop much more heuristically, as a by-product of informal conversations and socialization among themselves. This kind of echo chamber easily produces overconfidence - in the received wisdom or the model of the day. Meanwhile, the guild mentality renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism. The models may have problems, but only card-carrying members of the profession are allowed to say so. The objections of outsiders are discounted because they do not understand the models. The profession values smarts over judgment, being interesting over being right - so its fads and fashions do not always self-correct. — Dani Rodrik

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ... Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.
You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.
That includes women. Most especially women ...
To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children. — Leymah Gbowee

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider. — Dani Shapiro

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. — Isabel Allende

They're engineers," she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. "Emotionally, they're all thirteen years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they've discovered girls. They're all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly - but they're extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play. — Michael Crichton

That's plain enough, isn't it? You're no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You're no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He's using us all - irrespective of how we got here - in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he's using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day - a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home. — Eugene H. Peterson

The outsiders have become kings and queens of the castle. It is a whole lot easier to sit outside the tent and throw firecrackers inside; it is much, much harder to sit inside the tent and govern not only your enemies, but your close friends as well. — Hal Rothman

What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty. — Piper Kerman

I was very fortunate. I had a great group of friends in my life, and family, and so I felt a sense of safety and belonging that ... as you grow older, you realize that not everybody does feel that. And there's particular certain groups of kids who always feel like outsiders. But I was very fortunate. — Rib Hillis

Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don't like. — Jonathan Zittrain

Surely the United States Senate is big enough to take self-criticism and self-appraisal. Surely we should be able to take the same kind of character attacks that we "dish out" to outsiders. — Margaret Chase Smith

I think that 'The Outsiders' was meant to be written, and I was just picked to write it. — S.E. Hinton

There is so much information in one Hebrew word that translators are hard pressed to decide how much information should be cut. Since the first official translation (the Septuagint), Jewish translators advocated translating Hebrew (for outsiders) at the 'story' level.
pg viii — Michael Ben Zehabe

I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard. — Greg Rucka

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with. — William Trevor

The world's governments have many classified layers and outsiders rarely gain access to their hidden secrets. And certainly no common man can get confirmation of the existence of exotic technologies. — Takaaki Musha

There was only a language of families, a tongue woven from a lifetime of shared experiences. Its vocabulary consisted of gestures and curt sentences, incomprehensible to all outsiders. Inside, it wasn't difficult to translate at all. — Courtney Milan

I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way. — Christiane Amanpour

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise. — Noorilhuda

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and filmmakers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. — Albert Wendt

I like the brand Band of Outsiders. Their suits are cut really slim, for smaller framed gentlemen. — Aziz Ansari

I know I touch a lot of people. I don't call myself a role model. But I am a leader. Leaders are always watched by team members & outsiders — Spoken Reasons

Initially, it was about kids at the bottom rung of the social ladder, due to their looks and their class background. But they're also outsiders in terms of their peer group. — Jim McKay

A king must protect his people from outsiders, from invaders, and lead his people to defend themselves - a king must be the first to thrust himself between the land and all danger, just as a farmer stands to defend his fields from any robber. But it is not his duty to dictate to them what their innermost hearts may do. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. - written before 2003. — J.M. Roberts

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility. — Aleksandar Hemon

If an outsider perceives 'something wrong' with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask 'what mistake am I making?' before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong. — David Brin

The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know
and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover. — Catherynne M Valente

And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside. — Stephen King

Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders. — Soledad O'Brien

In towns, the nomads remain outsiders for a while. They become a class divorced from their occupation as herders. They are called drokpa in an undertone that indicates an unsophisticated, uneducated person, a person still in progress. In their own villages they are known to everyone for their horsemanship, their ability to round cattle, their weaving skills, for being a good child to their parents, or simply for their ability to make good yogurt and dried cheese. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

The only advice I can give you ... is to examine who you are ... Figure out what's important to you. Know yourselves. Know what's in your heart. Don't be swayed by fear or history or the opinions of outsiders. Find your own truth. It will lead you to the things you love. — J-Ax

He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects. . . . [H]e was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned. — Dan Jones

When I was young, no one wanted to be one; now even the President of the United States would call himself an outsider. So now I'm for insiders. — John Waters

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. — Timothy Keller

things started getting better when the people of West Point slum starting singing "No one is coming to save us!" It was a turning point. It meant they understood that local leaders were their best hope for surival. The people were finally in charge of their own future. The story turned from being about the failure of outsiders to the success of community resilience. And in the coming months when West Point slum's death toll fell far short of projections, citizens and local leaders could look at each other and say, "We did this ourselves! — Marc Maxmeister

For those of us who have a ground of knowledge which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to act fearlessly than to argue. — Olive Schreiner

We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family. — Desmond Tutu

The population of every country is nowadays a collection of
diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious,
and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders
from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to
draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is
the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles
for recognition that follow. — Zygmunt Bauman

It is, as calls to arms go, straightforward. Crystal clear. And if you aren't looking forward to Spurs and Kazan, to Southampton and Bournemouth, if that just doesn't get you going, wanting to be emotional, unashamedly emotional, optimistic, passionate in a way that outsiders love to mock and our own meek minded souls call 'embarrassing' then you know what? There's the door. There is the door, and you can walk through it, and both you and us will be happier for that. Because, for ninety minutes every few days, this fella represents Liverpool, eleven lads wearing Red represent Liverpool and we represent Liverpool. Wherever we are on globe, with an even greater responsibility if we are in the stadium. — Neil Atkinson

A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape. — Catherynne M Valente

What the local politicians actually meant was that they hoped to claim the land in the name of the public and then make the usual profits privatizing it. There was a principle at stake. They had to ensure their friends and not outsiders got the benefit. — Michael Moorcock

When I was about 11, 12, we moved to Jersey City. Everywhere I go I'm an outsider. — Michelle Rodriguez

But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it's like to be different. — Celeste Ng

I know that Oswald killed Kennedy. Now, was he pushed? Encouraged to do it by outsiders? Possibly. Possibly. Was he sitting down with Fidel Castro? No. — Bill O'Reilly

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at. — Barbara Kingsolver

Playing in (the Neurotic Outsiders) with John Taylor was great. A lot of pussy every time we played a gig. So many chicks. It was, like, 'Wow, John, really? So this is what it was like, huh?' And there would be like a couple guys with mohawks and a guy with, like, a jean jacket coming in to see me and Jonesy! — Duff McKagan

In times of shrinking expectations, ... everyone feels like a victim and pushes away outsiders to defend his own corner. — Oscar Handlin