Outside Quotes

1. "There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them."
Author: Alexei Panshin

2. "Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris."
Author: Anne Rice

3. "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 way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth."
Author: Anne Rice

4. "A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap."
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

5. "I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through."
Author: Barry Unsworth

6. "To give one can of beer to a thousand people is not nearly as much fun as to give 1,000 cans of beer to one guy. You give a thousand people a can of beer and each of them will drink it, smack his lips and go back to watching the game. You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it."
Author: Bill Veeck

7. "After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

8. "It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade."
Author: Charles Dickens

9. "It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently."
Author: Chris Hedges

10. "[...] Y'know, the Duchess Regan is living here at the tower now? I took your advice about not talking about her boffnacity [footnote], even with the duke dead and all, can't be too careful. Although, I caught sight of her in a dressing gown one day she was up on the parapet outside her solar. Fine flanks on that princess, despite the danger of death and all for sayin' so, sir." -YeomenAye, the lady is fair, and her gadonk as fine as frog fur [...]" -Pocketfootnote: Boffnacity: an expression of shagnatiousness, fit. from the Latin boffusnatious"
Author: Christopher Moore

11. "As an artist you actually do have to make a choice to be an outsider. If you're an outsider you have the freedom to say what people on the inside don't dare to say."
Author: Connie Nielsen

12. "Bunny Slippers watched my appraisal for at least a fullminute before clasping his hands and resting them on the table."You stand in the doorway, clothes sticking to you like you justgot out of the shower and didn't dry off." I hadn't dried offactually. "Your hair is wet like it's been raining, but it's nearninety outside. You glare at me for a good ten minutes beforeyou come over. Sit across from me in my booth, without aninvitation. Don't introduce yourself. Don't say hello. Youannounce you're not gay, but that I made you gay, and I amconfusing you?Well, when he said it like that."
Author: Dani Alexander

13. "If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue.""True. But all the same, it's hard just to sit by and let them starve.""This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not *let* them starve. I will not *let* the drought come. I will not *let* the river flood.' It is the gods who *let* these things, not you."
Author: Daniel Quinn

14. "When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.Almondine from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle "
Author: David Wroblewski

15. "I don't see myself going back to blonde outside of work though. I really like the red."
Author: Deborah Ann Woll

16. "And so when the whole man will be outside himself, and happy for no reason except that he is so outside himself, he will enjoy some of the ineffable share in the supreme good which draws everything into itself."
Author: Desiderius Erasmus

17. "I hate the sound of the world outside. Because everybody here can't wait to come and say goodbye..."
Author: Dulara Perera

18. "Jim. If you have any other outside events, don't confess them. That's my advice, okay?""What am I going to do, Bob? I have no family.""You have family," Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family."Jim fell asleep, his head leaning forward almost to his chest"
Author: Elizabeth Strout

19. "America stands before the world as an impetuous void, a fatality without substance. Nothing prepared her for hegemony; yet she tends toward it, not without a certain hesitation. Unlike the other nations which have had to pass through a whole series of humiliations and defeats, she has known till now only the sterility of an uninterrupted good fortune. If, in the future, everything should continue to go as well, her appearance on the scene will have been an accident without influence. Those who preside over her destiny, those who take her interests to heart, should prepare her for bad times; in order to cease being a superficial monster, she requires an ordeal of major scope. Perhaps she is not far from one now. Having lived, hitherto, outside hell, she is preparing to descend into it. If she seeks a destiny for herself, she will find it only on the ruins of all that was her raison d'être."
Author: Emil Cioran

20. "Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing."
Author: Ethan Embry

21. "I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. "Why was I so scared of everything?" I ask my mother nearly forty years later."Because you were born a Jewish person," she says."
Author: Gary Shteyngart

22. "A city may be dirty on the outside but is clean on the inside. Many cities in the world are clean on the outside but dirty on the inside."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

23. "Every moment is a crossroad in time. Consider that, as above so below and as inside so outside and live accordingly."
Author: Grigoris Deoudis

24. "To an outsider, it might look like a harsh thing, like inaction of the worst sort or a purposeful forgetting, but when you're the one choosing to look away, you know it's because your heart is simply trying to make it to tomorrow. your heart is scared to death, and it would rather not know than take a chance on being destroyed by the whole truth."
Author: Heather Cochran

25. "It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen

26. "None of his brothers dared to throw out a grumble, because the protocol button had been punched: If they were around outsiders, they treated him as their sovereign lord and king. Which meant no fucking around and no insubordination.?Maybe they needed visitors more often in the fucking house"
Author: J.R. Ward

27. "But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

28. "With my foot on the water, I feel The moon outside,Take on the utmost of its power. I rise and go out through the boats.I set my broad soul upon silver, On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,Stepping outward from the earth onto waterIn quest of the miracle."
Author: James Dickey

29. "Who do you seewhen you think of you?Are you an outsider,Cool, distant, angry,swimming against the current,or are you in the flow?When they tell you,This is who you are,do you say yes or no?Who do you seewhen you look beyondthe skin and the surface,when you drift to sleep,when you are the personno one else knows? Whoare you on the inside?Don't answer these questions.Not yet. First, open your eyes,your mind, your heart.See."
Author: James Howe

30. "Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned."
Author: Jasper Fforde

31. "There is so much darkness in Ember, Lina. It's not just outside, it's inside us, too. Everyone has some darkness inside. It's like a hungry creature. It wants and wants and wants with a terrible power. And the more you give it, the bigger and hungrier it gets."
Author: Jeanne DuPrau

32. "It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free."
Author: John O'Donohue

33. "Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing."
Author: John Sandford

34. "INERTIA: Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed - indefinitely!"
Author: Karen Russell

35. "He was handsome, like Po, and confident, like Po, and so much more authoritative in his bearing than Po could ever be. But - this Katsa came gradually to understand - he was not drunk on his power. He might never dream of helping a sailor to haul a rope, but he would stand with the sailor interestedly while the sailor hauled the rope, and ask him questions about the rope, about his work, his home, his mother and father, his cousin who spent a year once in the lakes of Nander. It struck Katsa that there was a thing she'd never encountered: a king who looked at his people, instead of looking over their heads, a king who saw outside himself."
Author: Kristin Cashore

36. "Several million people inside and outside Afghanistan are destitute and desperately in need of help."
Author: Lakhdar Brahimi

37. "We can talk to one another on telephones in banks, in cars, in line. No more sitting on the floor attached to a cord while everybody listens. No more standing outside the booth in the cold, fingering an adulterous dime. Wesend each other mail without stamps. Watch television without antennas. Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never on a bus, never in the lobby while we're waiting for the lawyer to call on us.Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon. Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin. Our groceries, scanned. Pump our own gas. Take off our shoes before boarding our plane. Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's no longer a planet: Forget it. I could go onand on, but you're still dead and nothing's any different."
Author: Laura Kasischke

38. "Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice."
Author: Leslie Marmon Silko

39. "Oh the weather outside is frightful..."
Author: Lois Lowry

40. "So many women just don't know how great they really are. They come to us all vogue outside and vague on the inside."
Author: Mary Kay Ash

41. "Max lives on the inside and the other kids live onthe outside. That's what makes him so different. Max doesn't have an outside. Max is all inside"
Author: Matthew Dicks

42. "Women are smart in business and dumb in love. They won't date outside their zip code, let alone outside the city. They are city snobs."
Author: Patti Stanger

43. "No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?"
Author: Paul Lockhart

44. "Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed."
Author: Peggy Noonan

45. "My dad died, I write. almost a year ago. Car accident. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add Not his fault before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table, wiping a hand across my cheeks.As he reads, my impulse is to reach out, grab the notebook, run outside, dump it in the trash, bury it in the snow, throw it under the wheels of a passing car - something, something, so I can go back fifteen seconds when this part ofme was still shut away and private. Then I look at Ravi's face again, and the normally white white whites of his eyes are pink. This causes major disruption to my ability to control the flow of my own tears. I see myself when I look at him right now: he's reflecting my sadness, my broken heart, back to me.He takes the pe, writes, and slides it over. You'd think it's something epic from the way it levels my heart. It isn't.I'm really sorry, Jill.Four little words."
Author: Sara Zarr

46. "I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough."
Author: Sarah Bessey

47. "I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from within."
Author: Simon Newcomb

48. "Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia."
Author: Siri Hustvedt

49. "The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth."
Author: Susan Griffin

50. "I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear."
Author: Tan Le

Outside Quotes Pictures