Rainbow Rowell Quotes

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.

I felt like, 'How do I fit in?' But then I never fit in. The whole time, I've never fit in.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I was an incredibly misanthrope. I couldn't relate to people my age, and I'm not sure why, as I wasn't particularly smart or interesting

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

As a teenager at high school, I felt like an outsider.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I've always felt a little uncomfortable around people.

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

I've often felt I don't belong quite wherever I am.

I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn't fully understand me, or I couldn't fully be myself. I just wasn't engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.

I've never really fit in.

I didn't feel like I fitted in. I felt like I was a hindrance to A-ha.

My motivation is, in part, a bit of angst that comes from feeling like I don't belong, that our generation doesn't belong.

I never felt like I belong to anything - to any groups of friends. I never really had that.

I never felt comfortable in my own skin, and I feel like I missed out on a lot of high school experiences because I was so worried about where I fit in because I was so confused.

Everybody feels like an outsider at some point in their lives.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

But you ain't part of it, are you?" said Granny conversationally. "You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

I think everybody gets lonely sometimes. I don't know if people can ever understand how you can be in a room full of people and be lonely sometimes.

I felt alienated at school, and I never did well with girls.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.