Being Out Of Place Quotes

1. "The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "Toward the end of Carmel's life, the perception of super talls shifted dramatically, thanks largely to televised NBA games, By 1975, pretty much everyone had seen super tall people on TV, in the context of being celebrated in front of sold-out basketball arenas. This new frame of reference could not have been more positive. By 1995 Shaquille O'Neal was known as The Man of Steel, not the Traveling Human Giant. The idea of super tall people as freaks was replaced by the idea of super tall people as amazing athletes."
Author: Arianne Cohen

3. "The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied."
Author: Auguste Laurent

4. "Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle."
Author: Bell Hooks

5. "Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes withbulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins."
Author: Bess Streeter Aldrich

6. "Being thrown out of this place is significantly better than being thrown out of a leper colony."
Author: Blake Edwards

7. "Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and evento raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At thesame time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendouscrimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than arelatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to finda more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmiclevels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives."
Author: Boria Sax

8. "Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being -- and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth."
Author: Carl Sagan

9. "The Inquisitor stared at him as if he were a talking cockroach. "Do you know about the cuckoo bird, Jonathan Morgenstern?"Jace wondered if perhaps being the Inquisitor—it couldn't be a pleasant job—had left Imogen Herondale a little unhinged."The cuckoo bird," she said. "You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest. The poor parent birds work themselves to death trying to find enough food to feed the enormous cuckoo child who has murdered their babies and taken their places.""Enormous?" said Jace. "Did you just call me fat?""It was an analogy.""I am not fat."
Author: Cassandra Clare

10. "People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even "good". What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I know absolutely nothing about art. - pg. 76"
Author: Daniel Quinn

11. "The point being that when there are lots of possible answers, most of the evidence you need goes into just locating the true hypothesis out of millions of possibilities - bringing it to your attention in the first place. The amount of evidence you need to judge between two or three plausible candidates is much smaller by comparison. So if you just jump ahead without evidence and promote one particular possibility to the focus of your attention, you're skipping over most of the work."
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

12. "Sandy fidgeted with his pen. "There's something I didn't write down. Maybe I shouldn't tell you, you being a judge and all, but, well, Jake Wexler… he's a bookie."No, he should not have told her. "A small-time operator, I'm sure, Mr. McSouthers," the judge replied coldly. "It can have no bearing on the matter before us. Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie any day over such a fine, upstanding, clean-living man."
Author: Ellen Raskin

13. "The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY."
Author: Erving Goffman

14. "Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places."
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

15. "The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite."
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

16. "Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and howling through the forest—moaning with a hungry sound as it strips the leaves from the bare boughs, and whirls them into the air. High over the tree-tops, in a widespread, trailing, noisy crew, there fly, with resounding cries, flocks of birds which seem to darken and overlay the very heavens. Then a strange feeling comes over one, until one seems to hear the voice of some one whispering: "Run, run, little child! Do not be out late, for this place will soon have become dreadful! Run, little child! Run!" And at the words terror will possess one's soul, and one will rush and rush until one's breath is spent—until, panting, one has reached home."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

17. "The Hoodmen are far from being the worst of the servants of the Cult of the Unwritten Book, but they are among the most peculiar. You know when you're trying to remember a word and it's on the tip of your tongue but you can't seem to get it out? Well, that's because the Hoodmen have eaten it. They eat all the words that are on the tips of other people's tongues. They thrive on misplaced words, savoring all the lost potential of each expression. They're also able to convert words into electricity. Mr. Steele took an entire phrase."
Author: Grant Morrison

18. "She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies."
Author: Guy De Maupassant

19. "You're wasting your life being involved with me.""I'm not wasting anything.""But I might never recover. Will you wait for me forever? Can you wait 10 years, 20 years?""You're letting yourself be scared by too many things," I said. "The dark, bad dreams, the power of the dead. You have to forget them. I'm sure you'll get well if you do.""If I can," said Naoko, shaking her head."If you can get out of this place, will you live with me?" I asked."Then I can protect you from the dark and from bad dreams. Then you'd have me instead of Reiko to hold you when things got difficult."Naoko pressed still more firmly against me."That would be wonderful," she said."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "I buckle over, sobbing, my head resting against the hard shower tiles. I remember crying like this when Sukey died, the tears harsh, devouring, total. I hadn't known I was capable of being so sad, and the discovery shocked and terrified me. It was like finding an extra door in the house I'd always lived in, and opening it to find that the grief had carved out new rooms, new hallways, an entire black annex of its own. There were dark places in my mind I'd never known existed, and now that I'd seen them I knew they'd always be there, lying in wait, even when the original door had been sealed up."
Author: Hilary T. Smith

21. "How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?"
Author: Jacques Derrida

22. "As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet."
Author: Jane Jacobs

23. "The most entertaining songs don't always come from a nice place. In songs where I think I'm being really sensitive, they seem quite boring actually. I've found that the songs that come out of nastier, more misanthropic places are better."
Author: Jarvis Cocker

24. "Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

25. "For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy--a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

26. "I'm never really comfortable at parties. Maybe I'm just not the partying type....I think it's because I'm never sure what to do with myself.I mean, there're drinks, but I don't like being drunk.... There's music, but I never really learned to dance to anything that involved an electric guitar. There are people to talk to...but once you put all the stupid things I do aside, I'm really not that interesting. I like reading, staying home, going on walks with my dog.... Who wants to hear about that? Especially when I would have to scream it over music to which no one dances.So I'm there but not drinking, listening to music but not dancing, and trying to have conversations with near-strangers about anything other than my own stupid life.... Leads to a lot of awkward pauses. And then I start wondering why I showed up in the first place."-- Cold Days (The Dresden Files Book 14), pg. 33"
Author: Jim Butcher

27. "When I was tiny, the county fair came through town. Our parents took us, and got tickets for the rides, even though I was scared to death of all of them. Edward was the one who convinced me to go on the merry-go-round. He put me up on one of the wooden horses and he told me the horse was magic, and might turn real right underneath me, but only if I didn't look down. So I didn't. I stared out at the pinwheeling crowd and searched for him. Even when I started to get dizzy or thought I might throw up, the circle would come around again and there he was. After a while, I stopped thinking about the horse being magic, or even how terrified I was, and instead, I made a game out of finding Edward.I think that's what family feels like. A ride that takes you back to the same place over and over."
Author: Jodi Picoult

28. "We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians. But the only way to apply something like scientific method in politics is to proceed on the assumption that there can be no political move which has no drawbacks, no undesirable consequences. To look out for these mistakes, to find them, to bring them into the open, to analyse them, and to learn from them, this is what a scientific politician as well as a political scientist must do. Scientific method in politics means that the great art of convincing ourselves that we have not made any mistakes, of ignoring them, of hiding them, and of blaming others from them, is replaced by the greater art of accepting the responsibility for them, of trying to learn from them, and of applying this knowledge so that we may avoid them in future."
Author: Karl Popper

29. "...home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better."
Author: Katrina Kenison

30. "I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

31. "One of the blessings human beings take for granted is the ability to remember pain without re-feeling it. The pain of the physical wounds is long gone …and the other kind of hurt, the damage done to our spirits, has been healed. We are careful with those scarred places in each other."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

32. "While you were leaping headlong into an ambush you should have foreseen, she might have been attacked. She might have been killed or worse.'Rupert came to a halt. 'What could be worse than her being killed, do you think?''I thought I had communicated to you Mr. Salt's opinions and wishes in the matter of Mr. Archdale's disappearance,' Beechey said. 'I thought I used easily comprehended terms.''You did,' Rupert said. 'I told Mrs. Pembroke about it in much the same way.''You told -' After a pause, Beechey went on, his voice strained, 'You cannot have revealed our suspicions about the - ahem - places of dubious repute. This is one of your jokes, I daresay. Ha ha.''She said her brother was not in a brothel or opium den and I was on no account to go to such places looking for him,' Rupert said. 'I obeyed, as I was obliged to do. You did tell me I wasn't to upset her, did you not?'There followed the kind of furious silence with which Rupert was more than familiar."
Author: Loretta Chase

33. "Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be."
Author: Margaret Atwood

34. "Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure."
Author: Mark Doty

35. "Consider A MoveThe steady time of being unknown,in solitude, without friends,is not a steadiness that sustains.I hear your voice waver on the phone:Haven't talked to anyone for days.I drive around. I sit in parking lots.The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.What should I say? There are waysto meet people you will want to love?I know of none. You come out strongerhaving gone through this? I no longerbelieve that, if I once did. Consider a move,a change, a job, a new place to live,someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.Then what is? I ask. What is?"
Author: Michael Ryan

36. "To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places."
Author: Michel De Certeau

37. "There's nothing about me on the jacket because I have no credentials. I majored in English at school, but I only took one creative writing class. I think I got a B. And I never really thought about getting an MFA. I'm too spiteful to take criticism constructively and I'm only comfortable being honest about people behind their backs, so workshops or group critiques were never what I was looking for. For years I just wrote in journals and didn't really worry about turning any of it into stories or stuff for other people to read, so I guess I developed my writing style by talking to myself, like some homeless people do. Only I used a pen and paper instead of just freaking out on the street. If they switched to a different medium they might be better off. It would probably help if they had someplace to live too."
Author: Paul Neilan

38. "Problem?" a silky voice murmured.I ignored Torin and turned my attention to the stack of notebooks near the couch."I am sorry for what I said about your father this morning," he said. "It was beneath me."I still didn't say anything."Being trapped thus is incredibly frustrating for me, and occasionally I take it out on others. Again, I apologize. Now, if you'd like, I can help you with what you're seeking."Knowing I'd probably regret it, I crossed the rom and yanked the canvas off the mirror. As before, he was sitting on the table, smirking at me."Jackass, jackass on the wall, where's the info on Hex Hall?"Torin laughed long and loud at that, and I saw that his teeth were slightly crooked. Seeing as how he was from the sixteenth century, I guess he was lucky to have any teeth at all."Oh, I do like you," he said, wiping tears from his eyes. "All these bloody warrior women are so serious. It's nice to have a real wit around the place again."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

39. "In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air."
Author: Richard Wright

40. "So many fairy tales were about breaking taboos, and being punished for crossing lines you shouldn't have crossed.Touching a spindle you were forbidden to touch. Inviting a witch into your cottage, and accepting the shiny apples she brought you, even though you knew better, because you wanted them.And while most heroes or heroines managed to scratch or scheme their way out of peril, it was easier to avoid doing something stupid in the first place. Smarter, better, and infinitely less fraught with regret."
Author: Sarah Cross

41. "The tight, throbbing feeling in my throat made me want to start sobbing, to break down, right there on an unfamiliar corner in front of a house just like my own. Everything seemed so out of control, as if even running the streets wouldn't save me. I wondered if this was how she felt running wild at night, this lost, loose feeling that no consequence could be so harmful as the sense of staying where you were, or of being who you are. I wanted to be somewhere else, out of the range of my mother's voice and ears, of Ashley's pouty looks, of the News Channel 5 viewing area. A place where the sight of my sobbing would tie me to no one and no one to me."
Author: Sarah Dessen

42. "Being here feels like I'm out of prison. This is the right place, the right time, the right team."
Author: Shaquille O'Neal

43. "Stay in the car Nick""okay."Ash gets out abd goes to look at the dead body."For an immortal being with 11,000 years under his belt Ash sure is stupid." Nick gets out and sees the blood."That's a lot of blood." Nick's book starts sending him an alert. "What Lassie? You going to tell Timmy about the well?" pulls out book, and opens it. words start to appear.LOOK AND YOUWILL SEE THATWHICH WAS CANNEVER BE.WHEN THEYSEEK A BOYYOUR AGE...... RUN, YOUFLIPPINMORON, RUN!"I'm not gonna argue with my book on that. The safest place is with Ash."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

44. "That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes."
Author: Steven Millhauser

45. "Nothing fires the warrior's heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one's own bowels or guts but from one's discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions."
Author: Steven Pressfield

46. "Look out there. Can you feel them? Incredible to think - other human beings out there. You strain your eyes the whole day long, see nothing, hear nothing, still can't believe it somehow - but know it's true. Other warm bodies, hearts pumping blood. That ought to make us feel less lonely, or safer, it seems. Then why is it so shocking? Because - they don't belong here. The possibility of life in this place is more terrifying than the place itself. Can it be that we're really here?"
Author: Ted Tally

47. "I felt like an integral part of my being had just been ripped out of me, only to have it replaced with something that did not belong."
Author: Theresa Smith

48. "So," she said. All it was was no wheels on Profane, the boy a born pedestrian. Under his own power which was also power over her. Then what was she doing: declaring herself a dependent? As if here were the heart's authentic income-tax form, tortuous enough, mucked up with enough polysyllabic words to take her all of twenty-two years to figure out. At least that long: for surely it was complicated, being a duty you could rightfully avoid with none of fancy's Feds ever to worry about tracking you down on it, but. That "but." If you did take the trouble, even any first step, it meant stacking income against output; and who knew what embarrassments, exposés of self that might drag you into?Strange the places these things can happen in. Stranger that they ever do happen. She headed for the phone. It was in use. But she could wait."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

49. "Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away."
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

Being Out Of Place Quotes Pictures