Quotes about otherness

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word.

So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren’t human, but they were people, she told herself; it’s not them, they’re us.

Alike and Equal are not the same.

We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.

Asians, in short, are determined to exclude Australia from their club for the same reason Europeans do Turkey: they are different from us. Prime Minister Keating liked to say that he was going to change Australia from "the odd man out to the odd man in" in Asia. That, however is an oxymoron: odd men don't get in.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.

Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten.

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.

If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.

Some can see no farther than their mirrors. What wears another face must go unseen.

Mavin shook her head, but withheld any judgment. If there was anything she had learned in long travels here and there, it was that to most people in the world, every unfamiliar thing was considered unacceptably strange.

Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.