Misfit Quotes

“And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“How lonely it is!
To be drowning,
in a place
where everyone can swim.”
― B. Damani

“Illusion"

A man wants to be free
flying in the emptiness of the universe
He thinks he means something
in the endlessness of nature
A man wakes up
being only a dust”
― Asper Blurry, Train to the Edge of the Moon

“My natural state is an outsider, and no matter what group I'm in or where I am, I've always felt like I'm outside the group and I've always been analyzing the group.”
― Michael Burry

“She walks,
on the streets,
with a face that,
doesn't belong.
It smiles more than,
many put together,
whole day long.
Her heart misfit,
a little chipped.
And she likes to,
call it once broken,
but now stitched.”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“I am that piece of a puzzle, which would never fit in any puzzles out there. I am that sky, which refused to turn blue every morning. I am that bird, which always had broken wings and yet always tried harder to fly. And I am that tunnel, which neither had a beginning nor end but one could always see the light at both the ends.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“I will always be a misfit,
The road paved through normality
will always bore a wild little spirit like me.”
― Nikki rowe

“When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we crossed the threshold we would throw them under the bench so hard that they struck the wall and raised a cloud of dust; this was" the way it should be done. "

But the new boy either failed to notice this maneuver or was too shy to perform it himself, for he was still holding his cap on his lap at the end of the prayer. It was a head-gear of composite nature, combining elements of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter-skin cap and the cotton nightcap--one of those wretched things whose mute ugliness has great depths of expression, like an idiot's face. Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and finally there was a kind of bag terminating in a cardboard-lined polygon covered with complicated braid. A network of gold wire was attached to the top of this polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel. The cap was new; its visor was shiny.

"Stand up," said the teacher.

He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh.

He bent down and picked it up. A boy beside him knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once again.

"Will you please put your helmet away?" said the teacher, a witty man.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Most friends had fallen away over the years. Either they'd started avoiding me, as if my grief and bad luck were contagious, or I'd started to avoid them, unwilling to give them the chance to disappoint me. Besides, too much time around normal people made me feel like an alien, unwanted and ugly, fluent in a different language.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“I can see every day that a squirrel's perfectly at home in a world of trees. But imagine taking that squirrel and plunking him down in the middle of the desert. This wonderful animal will suddenly feel depressed, anxious, confused, completely at a loss. There are plenty of animals who make a home in the desert, but not the squirrel.

There's nothing really wrong with that downcast squirrel in the desert. He's perfect. But he's only perfect when he's at home, in a place with lots of trees. In the desert a squirrel is an unhappy misfit.

Now imagine doing something stupid: taking that squirrel to a therapist so he'll feel better... You could do squirrel therapy forever but as long as the squirrel's in the desert, he's going to be miserable. But if you just pick him up and bring him to a place with trees, now he's at home and he's happy.

There are so many people who are miserable because they are squirrels in the desert. They think there's something wrong with them. They endlessly try to fix themselves but the fi xing doesn't work. Yet they keep trying because it's hard to face the ways they're not at home in the world. And yet how simple it would be if they could see there's nothing wrong with who they are, there's just something wrong with where they are.

But they can feel more at home than they ever imagined. They just have to look for ways that events in their lives are showing them the way home.”
― Mira Kirshenbaum, Everything Happens for a Reason: Finding the True Meaning of the Events in Our Lives [Paperback] [2005] (Author) Mira Kirshenbaum

“At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“I let every grain of sand slip through my fingers
As the wind carried them away;
Some drops of rain absorbed by the sand,
Some dissolved in the sea.

I'd go back carrying no traces
Of where I'd been,
But the sand settled between my fingers,
And the grains falling off from my toes.

I wouldn't soil the carpet on the floor
If only I'd known...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“The same tree has different shades of green;
Each leaf is unique, growing on the same twig.
Some veins wiggle too much,
Some networks- almost a mush.
Blossoming buds of the same branch
Do not take the same time to grow.
Then how do you think you'd fit in
In this strange world, away from home?”
― Sanhita Baruah

“I've spent most of my life feeling like a checker in the chess set”
― Martha Jones

“We all have a soul purpose. I can't be everything that the world needs, even if i dabble between all the crafts that shape me. I can be the expressive queen i am though, crumbling all the comfort zones this world has tried to build around me; to stop the evolution of my spirit. One day i am a calm breeze, the next i am a wild hurricaine - i am so deeply passionate, you'll feel me without a single hello.”
― Nikki rowe

“You don’t need to fit into any square, round or triangular holes anymore. You don’t need to fit into a pretty package or be the same as everybody else. You just need to accept and love yourself exactly as you are.”
― Saskia Lightstar, The Cancer Misfit: A Guide to Navigating Life After Treatment

“Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass- he didn't know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere.”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“Suddenly I caught sight of myself in a glass and saw what a figure of fun I looked. Hitherto I had always taken my appearance for granted; now I saw how inelegant it was, compared with theirs; and at the same time, for the first time, I was acutely aware of social inferiority. I felt utterly out of place among these smart rich people, and a misfit everywhere.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“I am but a frangible
Mud brick ordered
To build a home in the
Big city of humanity;
Yet break when
Forced to fit.”
― Nesrine BENAHMED

“It is unfortunate to say, but someone has to voice the pain, the struggle, the real and the lived through. You can thank the artists, poets, musicians for that - our stories may bleed sorrow but what we create seems to always hit right down to the core, the places many fear to tread, the soul. We give meaning for the scars.”
― Nikki rowe

“That there may be some who need coercion, who if given free rein would riot in selfish pleasure like unbridled beasts, is no doubt true, but one should show precisely by the fact that one knows how to speak with fear and trembling that one is not of their number.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“I just know you're a good man," she said desperately. "You're not a bit common!”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find

“A misfit is like the round peg that cannot fit into the square hole or the running river that just can’t stay still.”
― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future

“Steffy risked a glance at her fellow neighbors and townspeople. She often looked for kindred spirits in the crowd. None were ever found. Just once, she wished to see someone trying to hide a smile, a snicker, or plain sighing at the absurdity. The rowdy outcasts among the community were not welcome in the church. They knew better than to show their faces.”
― Jaime Allison Parker

“Since I am the child of parents with North Korean citizenship, I automatically became a Zainichi Chosenjin with North Korean citizenship. Like I said, when I was a kid, I thought that Hawaii was the symbol of depraved capitalism. I grew up surrounded by books written by Marx, Lenon, Trotsky, and Che Guevara. I attended a Chongryon-run Korean school, where I was taught that America was the enemy.

Even so, that doesn't mean I was infected by communist ideology. I didn't give a damn about North Korea, Marx, Chongryon, Korean schools, or America. I was just living with the circumstances that I happened to be born into. And given those screwed-up circumstances, naturally I became a misfit. I mean, how could I have turned out otherwise?”
― Kazuki Kaneshiro, Go

“Though I may have been a misfit, I was also a romantic.”
― Kazuki Kaneshiro, Go

“Of what profit is it to a businessman who loses his capital in pursuit of profit? How fit is a person who sees it fit to engage in a misfit practice of hazarding into a business without the benefit of profit?”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“These were the very same systems that Marshall wrote in 1992 would be" progressively less central to military operations "because they would become large, vulnerable targets as US adversaries developed their own reconnaissance-strike complexes. And yet it was into these legacy systems that Washington poured billions of dollars, year after year. And because Washington focused on means more than ends, pieces more than networks, platforms more than kill chains, the US military has ended up with an array of sensors and weapons that often struggle to communicate with another and function together--like a box of mismatching puzzle pieces...”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“When I say misfit, I’m talking about the fact that some of us just never found a way to fit in at all, from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense. I’m talking about how some of us experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly can’t make it in life. We serially flounder, or worse, we drown in our inabilities or mistakes, or even worse—since I’m old enough to understand that sometimes some of us don’t make it at all—we give up. Love and peace to the star stuff that carries those misfits we have lost too soon.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto