Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.

I do feel like an outsider, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

Acting is a weird, kind of alienating job because you're in an isolated place. Even if you're working with a lot of other people, you're kind of alienated. Actors say that a lot, and I kind of find that to be true.

I don't belong in the world. That's what it is. Something separates me from other people.

People would get up and leave so they would not have to sit anywhere near me.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

When you're the artsy, weirdo, introverted outsider growing up, you don't fit into your community.

I was ostracized by my community.

I was the kid a lot of other mothers wouldn't let you play with.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

[A pariah is] something like a martyr with more suffering and less class.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

By the very nature of being a clergyman's son, people tend to put you slightly apart, which is - you tend to live a life, at some stages, as being - people being suspicious of you and puts you rather on a - I don't mean lonely, particularly. But it does tend to put you apart.

And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.

When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.

My background sets me apart. I've never been able to relate to many people. I've always been the outcast child.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

I have no protection at home, or resting place abroad. ... I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth. I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.

If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.