Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it.

I’m a freak with power.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels...

But most of those to whom Ender’s Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of...

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

When you’re young, you’re fearless and more creative, more of an outsider.

Anna… envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as...

I think you only really feel like an outsider if you’ve been an insider.

Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way...

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I...

That’s what I love about you. You’re a freak. Like me.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I’m no spirit or demon. I’m nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I’ll...

She looked at me for a second and said, “Oh, never mind. I guess it’s true what Mom said? That you’ve led a sheltered life?”I said I thought the description fairly apt.

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

I’ve always been an outsider; a displaced person.

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a...

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn’t tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon...

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets,...

If you’ve ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays with you.

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear...

She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not “one of the girls” and she wasn’t “one of the guys.” She...

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like...

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual...

As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups…I’ve never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don’t have a place where I belong and...

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world...

Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me—I never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in...

Half of the time I don’t know what they’re talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I’m a foreigner in the world and I don’t understand...

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself – simply an urge...

For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals...