Strangeness Quotes

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

“People are strange...”
― Jim Morrison

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

“The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun…”
― Jim Morrison

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.”
― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase

“Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.

Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.

Some, downright weird.

But then again, you’d have to be.

To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.”
― Christopher Hopper

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is" dense ", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Perhaps we only leave
So we may once again arrive,
To get a bird's eye view
Of what it means to be alive.
For there is beauty in returning,
Oh how wonderful, how strange,
To see that everything is different
But know it's only you who's changed.”
― Erin Hanson

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”
― Alain de Botton

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run

“Normal....
What the majority of people look, act, and talk and like.
So what if the majority became what we see as wierd now?
Would our normal, become our new wierd?”
― Catherine

“Ah, sweetie. If the poets couldn’t unriddle them, then you certainly can’t. Be kind, and keep your ears on offer if she wants to talk. But you can’t draw out the strangeness, Edgar. It’s not a poison.”
― Allyse Near, Fairytales for Wilde Girls

“In my family strange is relative.”
― Kate Rockland, Falling Is Like This

“I look and I look...
I must have come to the wrong planet.
It's so strange here.”
― Sigbjørn Obstfelder

“I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle, occurring everywhere, without end, forever.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.”
― Charles Simic

“She would think with a kind of despair: What am I, in God's name—some kind of abomination?' And this thought would fill her with a very great anguish, because, loving much, her love seemed to her sacred. She could not endure that the slur of those words should come anywhere near her love. So now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blind problem, beating her spirit against a blank wall—the impregnable wall of non-comprehension: 'Why am I as I am—and what am I?' Her mind would recoil while her spirit grew faint. A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit—there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness.

She would think of Martin, for now surely she loved just as he had loved—it all seemed like madness. She would think of her father, of his comfortable words: 'Don't be foolish, there's nothing strange about you.' Oh, but he must have been pitifully mistaken—he had died still very pitifully mistaken. She would think yet again of her curious childhood, going over each detail in an effort to remember. But after a little her thoughts must plunge forward once more, right into her grievous present. With a shock she would realize how completely this coming of love had blinded her vision; she had stared at the glory of it so long that not until now had she seen its black shadow. Then would come the most poignant suffering of all, the deepest, the final humiliation. Protection—she could never offer protection to the creature she loved: 'Could you marry me, Stephen?' She could neither protect nor defend nor honour by loving; her hands were completely empty. She who would gladly have given her life, must go empty-handed to love, like a beggar. She could only debase what she longed to exalt, defile what she longed to keep pure and untarnished.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“Grief is becoming a stranger to oneself.”
― Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

“The strangenesses are multiplying,he wrote in his article,though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it's difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“People who look unartistic create the most artistic art.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Estranho é o mundo, pai, que só une se desunindo; erguida sobre acidentes, não há ordem que se sustente; não há nada mais espúrio do que o mérito, e não fui eu que semeei esta semente.”
― Raduan Nassar, Lavoura Arcaica

“But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together, /
More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy; / But, howsoever, strange and admirable”
― William Shakespeare, Midsummer-Night's Dream. Love's Labor's Lost. Merchant of Venice. as You Like It. All's Well That Ends Well. Taming of the Shrew

“We live in strange and marvelous times.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller