Strangeness Quotes - Page 5

• It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

  Flannery O'Connor

  Artist

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.343, Macmillan

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• I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Fiction, Imagine, Terrible

  Siri Hustvedt (2008). “The Sorrows of an American: A Novel”, p.228, Macmillan

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• The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Weight, Claims, Evidence

  "Theeorie analytique des probabilites". Book by Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1812.

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• Floating in the void free of gravity I made my way along the side of the ship. I listened to my own breaths. It was so dark and I was so weightless that I had to look for my bubbles to be sure which way was up. I swam backward a little away from the boat and into outer space and waved my arm through the water. Sure enough the phosphorescents appeared trailing my movement like the tail of a shooting star. I let myself tip upside down and floated there watching the gentle snowstorm marveling that a world of such strangeness existed here all the time just under the surface.

  Elisabeth Eaves

  Stars, Dark, Space

  Elisabeth Eaves (2011). “Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents”, p.208, Seal Press

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• Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

  Niall Williams

  House, Way, Normal

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• To return to awareness is to notice this new world with baby-eyes, and to appreciate her strangeness.

  Sara Genn

  Baby, Eye, Appreciate

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• It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

  Miguel Syjuco

  These Days, Kill Me, Justification

  Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.28, Macmillan

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• Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Indispensable, Condiments

  Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.206, CUP Archive

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• You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.

  Jean Lorrain

  Fear, Reality, Invisible

  Jean Lorrain (2002). “Nightmares of an Ether-drinker”

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• Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

  Dan Simmons

  Perfect, Creative, Mixtures

  Dan Simmons (2011). “Hyperion”, p.261, Spectra

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• Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.

  Henri Nouwen

  Christian, Men, Space

  Henri Nouwen (2013). “Reaching Out”, p.65, Image

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• My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

  Anthony Doerr

  Silence, Pockets, Language

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• It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Greatness, Exaggeration Is, Imagination

  Daniel J. Boorstin (1978). “The Image”

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• An honest man is strange when he is among dishonest men, but it is a good kind of strangeness.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  God, Christian, Religious

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• Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

  Alexander Smith

  Hurt, Heart, Missing

  Alexander Smith (2012). “Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.62, tredition

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• Good writing and dark wit always excite me and they come together thrillingly in this book. It has a quiet grip on the strangeness of the interior and exterior worlds of love and politics. I delighted in the writing and the scope.

  Jenny Diski

  Book, Writing, Dark

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• We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Women, Degrees, Proportion

  Charles Baudelaire (1956). “The Essence of Laughter: And Other Essays, Journals, and Letters”

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• To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy.

  Trevor McDonald

  Years, England, Certain

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• To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Grief, Over You, Faces

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• The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

  Albert Camus

  Distance, Reality, Men

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.22, Vintage

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• Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love, Confusion, Forgiving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.350, Modern Library

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• Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

  Kelly Link

  Writing, Childhood, Normal

  Interview with Maggie Slater, www.apex-magazine.com. July 2, 2013.

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• Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected, and make sense.

  E. O. Wilson

  Faith, Dream, Age

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• Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.

  Jack Vance

  Genius

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• The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened ' it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

  Douglas Adams

  Mean, Opportunity, Years

  Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams at Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, www.edge.org. September 17, 2001.

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