Outcast Quotes

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm.

People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.

Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.

The wolf said, "You know, my dear, it isn't safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone." Red Riding Hood said, "I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid, worldview. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must be on my way.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.

What a desperate, pathetic fool I was. Time after time, my "friends" had shown me their true colors. Yet, I still wanted to believe they were sorry for causing me pain. p. 128

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddah held out hope that the suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that even the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers - the outcasts - had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope.

Stay away from the normals, the small-minded people who fill their brains with small-minded pursuits, who blend in and keep up with the Joneses. Those people will tear you down and make you boring. Instead, surround yourself with the weirds. With the misfits, oddballs, and outcasts. Because the normals, bless their hearts, have no idea how to have fun.

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!

'Shoot the wounded... what we do to people who are the most vulnerable... we 'shoot the wounded.' As if they haven't suffered enough, we add to it by gossiping and treating hurt people like outcasts." ..."I think we killed Ronnie's spirit... Instead of coming alongside her and supporting her through this, I failed her...

We may wonder what is going on in the back of the mind and what betides in the mood of some people who live on the edge of isolation and emotional poverty. They belong to life’s outcasts: deserted by affection, deprived of physical or lingual contact and finally reduced to silence. ("Why didn't he ask ? ")

In the architecture of their life some may display Potemkin happiness in view of hiding the dark features of their fair weather relationship, preferring to set up a window dressing of fake satisfaction rather than being rejected as emotional outcasts. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")

God dances with the outcast.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

Grover Underwood of the satyrs!" Dionysus called. Grover came forward nervously. "Oh, stop chewing your shirt," Dionysus chided. "Honestly, I'm not going to blast you. For your bravery and sacrifice, blah, blah, blah, and since we have an unfortunate vacancy, the gods have seen fit to name you a member of the Council of Cloven Elders." Grover collapsed on the spot. "Oh, wonderful," Dionysus sighed, as several naiads came forward to help Grover. "Well, when he wakes up, someone tell him that he will no longer be an outcast, and that all satyrs, naiads, and other spirits of nature will henceforth treat him as a lord of the Wild, with all rights, privileges, and honors, blah, blah, blah. Now please, drag him off before he wakes up and starts groveling." "FOOOOOD," Grover moaned, as the nature spirits carried him away. I figured he'd be okay. He would wake up as a lord of the Wild with a bunch of beautiful naiads taking care of him. Life could be worse.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

Knowledge does have a way of making you an outcast.

It is said that the fear of public speaking is a fear greater than death for most people. According to psychiatrists, the fear of public speaking is caused by the fear of ostracism, the fear of standing out, the fear of criticism, the fear of ridicule, the fear of being an outcast. THE FEAR OF BEING DIFFERENT PREVENTS MOST PEOPLE FROM SEEKING NEW WAYS TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS.

This is what God's kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there's always room for more.

It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. a

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because it will result in my being misunderstood. For me there can be no recreation in the company of others, no intelligent conversation, no exchange of information with peers; only the most pressing needs can make me venture into society. I am obliged to live like an outcast.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

We''re all misfits here,” he says, almost proudly. “That's why I started this squat, after all.  For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else.  Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird.  That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend.  From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions.  From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.

I’ve been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I’ve been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world.

Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion.

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

Black doves and white crows flew to her, for she was mother to the outcasts.

The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

All little creatures are beautiful...every living thing when it first sees life is born in beauty. What they grow to be is a different matter.

Lunar. Cyborg. Fugitive. Outlaw. Outcast.

We aren’t so different. Outcasts and wanderers all—souls clinging to the margins of the world.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

We aren't human." "Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.

What's the safest thing to be when one is met by a gang of social outcasts in an alley? ...No, another social outcast!

Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified — whichever came first.

Look for the person everyone hates, and love them.

We are all freaks. Yes! Alone in our rooms at night, we are all weirdoes and outcasts and losers. That is what being a teenager is all about! Whether you admit it or not, you are all worried that the others won’t accept you, that if they knew the real you, they would recoil in horror. Each of us carries with us a secret shame that we think is somehow unique…And if we are, each of us, freaks – then can’t we accept what’s different in each other and move on?

I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.

The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And you askance reply. Be an outcast; Be pleased to walk alone (Uncool) Or line the crowded River beds With other impetuous Fools. Make a merry gathering On the bank Where thousands perished For brave hurt words They said. Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast. Qualified to live Among your dead.

As empaths, our high level of sensitivity means that we are prone to feeling like eternal outsiders who are in the world but not quite of the world.

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.

Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful.

There is no such thing as unlimited trust. At some point, all beings with free will can, and will, betray you when you're no longer pursuing the same goals.

It's a sword, not a fairy wand, you know.

The old outcast gape the darkness and said: “The lonely man is a fire without fireplace…”.

The hardest thing about being an outcast isn't the love you don't receive. It's the love you long to give that nobody wants. After a while, it backs up into your system like stagnant water and turns toxic, poisoning your spirit. When this happens, you don't have many choices available. You can become a bitter loner who goes through life being pissed off at the world; you can fester with rage until one day you murder your classmates. Or, you can find another outlet for your love, where it will be appreciated and maybe even returned.

the outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.

Books have always been my escape - where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing... Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry...When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter. If I could choose my favorite day, my favorite moment in some perfect dreamscape, I know exactly where I would be: stretched out in bed in the afternoon, knowing that the kids are taking a nap and I've got two more chapters left of some heartbreaking novel, the kind that messes you up for a week.

Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time.

If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.

Of all individuals, the hated, the shunned, and the peculiar are arguably most themselves. They wear no masks whatsoever in order to be accepted and liked; they do seem most guarded, but only by their own hands: as compared to the populace, they are naked.

I've felt as if I didn't exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can't imagine how much alone I've been all my life.

When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

Good evening, Sergeant,” Helen said. “What’s that?” He held the bag out to her. “A present for Lieutenant Angel. Something to eat on your journey.” She took it and put it back on the desk. “Wipe that damn grin off your face, Sergeant. A smiling Toltec is a contradiction in terms.

I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around, like children love recess bells. I still hear the sound of you and think of playgrounds where outcasts who stutter beneath braces and bruises and acne are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies are never gonna grow up to be happy. I think of happy when I think of you. So wherever you are I hope you’re happy, I really do. I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking I hope your lungs are open and breathing this life I hope there’s a kite in your hand that’s flying all the way up to Orion and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out. I hope you’re smiling like God is pulling at the corners of your mouth, ‘cause I might be naked and lonely shaking branches for bones but I’m still time zones away from who I was the day before we met. You were the first mile where my heart broke a sweat, and I wish you were here; I wish you’d never left; but mostly I wish you well. I wish you my very, very best

a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?

She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side.

Not being liked was so much worse than being invisible.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us? Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness. We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

The hardest part about being an outcast, isn't the love you don't receive. It's the love you long to give that nobody wants.

The manager once called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.

There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.

for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's love.

This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand.

The earth is not just for the clever and the strong.

Stig: 'Of course, she'll sail rings around Wolfswind,' Hal: 'Then why didn't you tell him that?' Stig: 'I like my head where it is.

She would become an outcast from the only world in which she had ever belonged. But her oaths meant nothing if they asked her to forsake people she cared about in their greatest moment of need.

Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness.

There were six dolls to be taken up and dressed every morning, for Beth was a child still, and loved her pets as well as ever. Not one whole or handsome one among them; all were outcasts till Beth took them in; for, when her sisters outgrew these idols, they passed to her.... Beth cherished them all the more tenderly for that very reason, and set up a hospital for infirm dolls. No pins were ever stuck into their cotton vitals; no harsh words or blows were ever given them; no neglect ever saddened the heart of the most repulsive: but all were fed and clothed, nursed and caressed, with an affection which never failed.

I'm a lion in a strange land.

Then stop being a know-it-all lionpaw retorted You're not my mentor so stay out of my fur. Lionpaw at Berrynose in Outcast pg 67

And Jaypaw-well, Jaypaw can heal cats." "Thanks a bunch." muttered Jaypaw.

You can always win points; winning people’s respect is a lot more important.

I wasn't popular, but I wasn't an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.

I am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever.

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.

I think that others can drive a creature to naughtiness, always accusing and blaming them. After a while it must make the creature unhappy and drive him...to be naughty, because nobody expects them to be good...

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

To engage Jews excluded by the harsh and judgmental elite, Jesus insisted on preaching out in nature to mass audiences. To renew appreciation for a loving and compassionate Divine, Jesus sat alongside the poor and the outcast, most notably lepers.

Originals cost more than imitations.

...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

Did all outcasts come to this realization at a certain point in life? That being outcast from a bogus and pornographic society actually was a good thing? I hoped so. I hoped there was an army of us out there, smiling about it that very moment.

The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one.

In comic books, people with gifts became superheroes; in real life they became outcasts.

Unfortunately, the world has taken some of the greatest minds God has given us and locked them up in cages. Most very brilliant or creative people seem strange to ordinary people. Geniuses are almost always outcasts. The intelligent are bullied on the playground. They see the world differently and are shunned for it. They nearly all turn out to be lonely at the least, locked up at the worst. It's human nature to encourage the status quo and shun those who see life differently.

I am the outcast come home to roost and the eggs of tomorrow are incubating in my fame. You hate me, you love me, you made me, and now I am in you. I am like that disease brewing in your loins and I think you like it…

And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.

One creature's truth is another's lie. (Scroom of Strix Struma)

Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Salinger, Plath, Toole, the literature of choice for the brooding outcast.

Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. “ ’Cos I had some sense.

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

Just thinking. Man, Sophie, it's only your first day and you've already befriended the school outcast, pissed off the most popular girls at Hecate, and developed a full-blown thing for the hottest guy. If you can manage to get detention tomorrow, you'll be like, legendary.

When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It’s the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not being a hot sexy number but I am livid that—as a girl who doesn’t attract men—I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn’t even be around.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.' These men without possessions or power, these strangers on Earth, these sinners, these followers of Jesus, have in their life with him renounced their own dignity, for they are merciful. As if their own needs and their own distress were not enough, they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation of others. They have an irresistible love for the down-trodden, the sick, the wretched, the wronged, the outcast and all who are tortured with anxiety. They go out and seek all who are enmeshed in the toils of sin and guilt. No distress is too great, no sin too appalling for their pity. If any man falls into disgrace, the merciful will sacrifice their own honour to shield him, and take his shame upon themselves.

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.

. . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.

I began to see myself as someone who can help others understand diversity rather than feeling like a social outcast. Ellen taught me to not care about other people's opinions. She taught me to be truthful. She taught me to be free. I began to live my life in love and complete acceptance. For the first time I had truly accepted myself.

He said that I have to remember that even though I've changed a lot in here, I'm going back to a world that hasn't changed

Everything in the world starts small and then becomes bigger—except bad things. They start big, and then get smaller.

The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.

He came with death held in his paw Which no rat born could face Oh woe to those who break the law Of Sunflash and his mace!

The most interesting people are the unusual. No one writes about or discusses the average, the ordinary, or the common; they write about and discuss the weird, the mad and the different, so if you are one, even though the opinions of others are of no importance, you are, in their eyes, significant enough to notice and remember.

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity. Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...

I am Outcast." "The kids behind me laugh so loud I know they’re laughing about me. I can’t help myself. I turn around. It’s Rachel, surrounded by a bunch of kids wearing clothes that most definitely did not come from the EastSide Mall. Rachel Bruin, my ex-best friend. She stares at something above my left ear. Words climb up my throat. This was the girl who suffered through Brownies with me, who taught me how to swim, who understood about my parents, who didn’t make fun of my bedroom. If there is anyone in the entire galaxy I am dying to tell what really happened, it’s Rachel. My throat burns." "Her eyes meet mine for a second. “I hate you,” she mouths silently.

But God's love is big enough to touch any life, to make light out of any darkness. Jesus came that we might have life, so that no more would we have to die in depression, anger or pain. He loved people back to life. He would go anywhere, talk to anyone. And wherever He went, He would stop for the one-- the forgotten one, the one who was rejected, outcast, sick, even stone dead. Even a thief who was dying for his crimes on the cross next to Him. In the Kingdom of God's love there is no sinner who cannot come home.

This book is a labor of love. It is dedicated to people who have cried themselves to sleep because they were 'different'. It is also a celebration of the 'inner outcast' in all of us, and a humble attempt to inspire tolerance, understanding, and acceptance." the intro from the author

If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single fateful word. They are les miserables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?

Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry

I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all weekend and listen to classical music.

Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn't seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn't champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn't fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, 'I was in prison.' The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.

You love young ones and babes, I know this. The young will always befriend and admire you...all the young ones of the earth belong to you in friendship. Be good to them. —Breeze, to Sunflash the Mace

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Neither boy ever intended to speak about the events at the cliff that day. But of course their mothers eventually worked the truth out of them. Mothers always do.

Is it arrogance if one is truly superior?

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, If we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or strife.

He wondered at the atrocities human kind was capable of committing. The majority of those housed below were ill, mentally or physically, not witches. Most were poor victims--the outcasts of society; or the opposite, people so blessed, others coveted their lives.

She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not "one of the girls" and she wasn't "one of the guys." She was an outsider gazing in, endlessly comfortless, while they wished they had what it took to be less like the others and more like her.

In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.

I would rather devote myself to what I always did - trying to heal people. That is my way of healing myself.

He knelt among the shadows and felt his isolation bitterly. They were savages it was true; but they were human and the ambushing fears of the deep night were coming on. Ralph moaned faintly. Tired though he was, he could not relax and fall into a well of sleep for fear of the tribe. Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. "'Cos I had some sense.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

They won’t tell you fairy tales of how girls can be dangerous and still win. They will only tell you stories where girls are sweet and kind and reject all sin. I guess to them it’s a terrifying thought, a red riding hood who knew exactly what she was doing when she invited the wild in. ~ Nikita Gill ~

She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.

Karna is a good man, but he sees good even in what is bad. His seeing it as good doesn't make the bad good, but makes his goodness look bad.

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.

Uncle had learned long ago that obeying a rule in fact but not in spirit was very hard on people who say we for I and who do not allow dogs on their premises.

They are saying that if life has a structure, a staff, a sensible scaffold, we hang our nonsense on it. And they are saying that broken parts add color and music to the staff of life.

He was fine; he, that orphan that foundling that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked full in the face that society from which he was banished, and into which he had so powerfully intervened; that human justice from which he had snatched its prey; all those tigers whose jaws perforce remained empty; those myrmidons, those judges, those executioners, all that royal power which he, poor, insignificant being, had foiled with the power of God.

I live on a ship full of outcasts, populated by society's unacceptable. And yet, here I stand, happy. And I love them all. It is time, Primrose thought, to tender myself the same level of courtesy. Or perhaps it is time that I simply accepted that I too am one of the strange and abandoned. Appearances be damned.

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads. Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place. Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows? ...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right. How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.... Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. . . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain

She sometimes wished she was more thick-skinned, so that she could see nothing, feel nothing.

Only if you're a numbskull." "Numbskull yourself! Want me to numb your skull with this shovel?

Did you shoot me again sweetheart?

People like us are dead to society unless we’re pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them.

To the loner, loneliness is a treasure that cannot be traded, even for the nicest of companies.

Here, take this, she would say, take this, and tell me where he is. Tell me whether he's dead or alive, so I can walk as his widow or his wife. No one would, or could, tell her, and so she continued to cook, and to learn new things all the while searching for an answer among the outcasts. The way he carried his body, the way he walked in my life, Tatiana thought, declared that he was the only man I had ever loved, and he knew it. And until I was alone without him, I thought it was all worth it.

One thing' Erak said. 'Tell your men to keep their noses clean while they're in Hallasholm. I don't want any trouble.' Zavac nodded and smiled. 'I understand. This is a quiet town and you don't want the peace disturbed.' Erak smiled back, but it was like a smile on the face of a shark. 'No. This is a very violent town and if your men cause trouble, my people will break their heads a for them. I don't want to be paying any blood money for damage done to your crew. Understand?' Zavac's smile faded. He looked for some sign that the Oberjarl was joking, but he saw none. He nodded again, slowly this time.

Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere but in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.

True acceptance doesn’t require you to fit in or change who you are. It doesn’t have to be sought; it’s given to you.

I want you to live up to your potential!" "Let me go," I say quietly. I don't want to be your creature. I don't want to hurt people." "The world has already hurt you," he counters. "The world put you here. You're here because of them! You think if you leave they're going to accept you? You think you can run away and live a normal life? No one will care for you. No one will come near you-You'll be an outcast like you've always been! Nothing has changed! You belong with me!

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom Homer denounces — the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.

outcast!” When he’d disappeared into the bushes, Juniper wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry, Percy. I didn’t mean to get you involved. Leneus is still a lord of the Wild. You don’t want to make an enemy of him.” “No problem,” I said. “I’ve got worse enemies than overweight satyrs.” Nico walked back to us. “Good job, Percy. Judging from the trail of goat pellets, I’d say you shook him up pretty well.

Nothing could be easier than disturbing a status quo instituted by others; the real work of the sinister current is to break the rules we rigidly establish for ourselves.” -Zeena Schreck for "Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity," University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one’s own self. Starlight vision, the “other way of knowing,” is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman’s Mysteries, “These subjective factors … are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated.

I am Laila, of the night. I have walked through godlight and through darkness. I have fought demons and I have slain angels. I am Laila, of the shadows. I have hidden and run, and I have stood up and striven. I am Laila, of tears and blood, of sins and of piety. I am Laila, outcast from Hell, banished from Heaven. I am alone, in darkness. I am Laila, of light and of fire. I am fallen. I rise again.

Oftentimes in a society when people of a certain type, whether individual or a group, are subconsciously portrayed by the media as abnormal, they also slowly, subconsciously become enemies of that society due to feelings of cultural guilt. Ultimately by this the inflated media is an enemy of its very own cause.

She alone was left standing, amid the accumulated riches of her mansion, while a host of men lay stricken at her feet. Like those monsters of ancient times whose fearful domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls and was surrounded by catastrophes...The fly that had come from the dungheap of the slums, carrying the ferment of social decay, had poisoned all these men simply by alighting on them. It was fitting and just. She had avenged the beggars and outcasts of her world. And while, as it were, her sex rose in a halo of glory and blazed down on her prostrate victims like a rising sun shining down on a field of carnage, she remained as unconscious of her actions as a splendid animal, ignorant of the havoc she had wreaked, and as good-natured as ever.

Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet.

Oh that I could give any idea of the scene; of that sweet, sweet, good, good woman in all the radiant beauty of her youth and animation, with the red scar on her forehead of which she was conscious, and which we saw with grinding of our teeth- remembering whence and how it came; her loving kindness against our grim hate; her tender faith against all our fears and doubting; and we, knowing that so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God.

Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom--the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is regulated to private, individual acts of charity or left to the churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America's god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.

...for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

Grey’s OK on a man,’ says Mary-Anne. ‘Silver fox and all that.’ Ruth notices that Frank doesn’t seem to mind this description. She also muses that there isn’t a female equivalent to ‘silver fox’. ‘Grey-haired old bat’ doesn’t cover it somehow.

Aw, man. I’d just shot an angel in the face.I made my way into the foyer and sat down on the stairs. I glanced up at the big old grandfather clock. It was going on ten. My folks would be home soon. “How was your evening, honey?” “Killed an angel.” “Well, isn’t that nice.” That wasn’t happening. Daddy never liked guns in the first place, Mother just pretended to. I was so grounded.

These guys fart a lot as well. I'm not saying that girls don't. We just aren't as passionate about them. The smell is sometimes overwhelming and I want to gag. They don't just limit these attacks to the classroom-they can come at you from anywhere around the school. The corridor, the stairwell, the canteen line. There's one area we call Fart Corridor because it belongs to the Year Eights and Nines, who are the biggest perpetrators. They make no apologies and feel no embarrassment. If a girl did one at St. Stella's she'd be an outcast for the rest of her natural life. Here, it's a badge of honor.

The people of the heart—the painters, the poets, the musicians, the dancers, the actors—are all irrational. They create great beauty, they are great lovers, but they are absolutely unfit in a society that is arranged by the head. Your artists are thought by your society to be almost outcast, a little bit crazy, an insane type of people. Nobody wants his or her children to become musicians or painters or dancers. Everybody wants them to be doctors, engineers, scientists, because those professions pay. Painting, poetry, dance, are dangerous, risky—you may end up just a beggar on the street, playing on your flute.

To embrace the strategy of Jesus is to be engaged in what Dean Brackley calls "downward mobility." Our locating ourselves with those who have been endlessly excluded becomes an act of visible protest. For no amount of our screaming at the people in charge to change things can change them. The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them. The trickle-down theory doesn't really work here. The powers bent on waging war against the poor and the young and the "other" will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.

Kundalini means, according to Zeena ‘She Who is Hidden,’ and points to the dormant goddess in every human being’s body. While the kundalini force is found in muladharachakra, she hypnotizes humans, like maya herself, and renders them slaves to the illusory. Kundalini can only awaken people if she travels up along the spine.' --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

I am banished from the patient men who fight. They smote my heart to pity, built my pride. Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light. Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight They went arrayed in honour. But they died,-- Not one by one: and mutinous I cried To those who sent them out into the night. The darkness tells how vainly I have striven To free them from the pit where they must dwell In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel. Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

Princess, you have decided to follow the hard path. I cannot promise you the life a royal princess deserves,' he began slowly. 'I am a wandered myself, stuck in an eternal search. I am a vagabond who doesn't know where I am going. My past beckons my present, but I can see only a blurred future. All my life, I have been slighted as a person of low birth- and the stigma will rub off on you as well. Yet, I am not ashamed of who I am...

Don't you recognize me, Mary? It's your good friend Allie the Outcast - although it looks like you're the one who's the out-cast now." Then Allie realized something with far too much glee. "Now that you're here - alive and all - there's something I've wanted to do for a very long time." Then Allie reached back, curled her fleshie's right hand into a fist, and swung it toward Mary with all her might. This was one strong fleshie! The punch connected with Mary's eye so hard, that Mary's entire body spun around, and she collapsed into a leopard chair. Allie's knuckles hurt, but it was a good kind of pain. "My eye!" wailed Mary. "Oh! My eye.

This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things—and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today—this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins—there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack. It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible. And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not.

It's hard to imagine, seeing how crowded the sky looks tonight, how far away one star is from another. Like, people, really. We can appear to be standing right next to each other, and yet in our minds, we can be thousands of miles away, lost to the outer reaches. But we're all together in the same black soup, which makes us all related somehow.

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves.

I was a young, & had deep loves, & my heart would overflow with enthusiasm! And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thought out loud! And they gaped back at me, without understanding. And I withdrew from them, & they said to me: Arrogant one! And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasms broke out into odes, conversation; & my companions laughed and used to point at me as a madman. So I suffered, doubted, cursed, & no one believed me sincere. It’s as if this heart, once so full of strength & love were annihilated.

A unifying factor between the different traditions and lineages of Tantra, is that it is feminine in nature. It acknowledges the feminine as the basis from which all the practices spring. Therefore, Tantra is by its nature, the understanding that all phenomenal existence, the universe, or cosmos, that we experience is feminine in nature.

No, Maximilien, I am not offended," answered she, "but do you not see what a poor, helpless being I am, almost a stranger and an outcast in my father's house, where even he is seldom seen; whose will has been thwarted, and spirits broken, from the age of ten years, beneath the iron rod so sternly held over me; oppressed, mortified, and persecuted, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, no person has cared for, even observed my sufferings, nor have I ever breathed one word on the subject save to yourself. Outwardly and in the eyes of the world, I am surrounded by kindness and affection; but the reverse is the case. The general remark is, `Oh, it cannot be expected that one of so stern a character as M. Villefort could lavish the tenderness some fathers do on their daughters. What though she has lost her own mother at a tender age, she has had the happiness to find a second mother in Madame de Villefort.' The world, however, is mistaken; my father abandons me from utter indifference, while my mother-in-law detests me with a hatred so much the more terrible because it is veiled beneath a continual smile.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

Restrooms at gas stations were an unpleasant and shocking surprise; I had never considered the serious drawbacks of such lazily-cleaned rooms. I was completely unable to ignore the filth, and wasted a burst of power to turn the sink, floors and porcelain toilet into sparkling, clean examples of their kind before using the facility. I felt that was a much less judgmental response than simply blowing the place off the face of the Earth, which was also a distinct temptation, especially when the storekeeper overcharged me for a bottle of cold water.

The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced. He has been the sport and prey of priest and king, the food of superstition and cruel might. Crowned force has governed ignorance through fear. Hypocrisy and tyranny—two vultures—have fed upon the liberties of man. From all these there has been, and is, but one means of escape—intellectual development. Upon the back of industry has been the whip. Upon the brain have been the fetters of superstition. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished. Reading, writing, thinking and investigating have all been crimes. Every science has been an outcast. All the altars and all the thrones united to arrest the forward march of the human race. The king said that mankind must not work for themselves. The priest said that mankind must not think for themselves. One forged chains for the hands, the other for the soul. Under this infamous regime the eagle of the human intellect was for ages a slimy serpent of hypocrisy. The human race was imprisoned. Through some of the prison bars came a few struggling rays of light. Against these bars Science pressed its pale and thoughtful face, wooed by the holy dawn of human advancement. Bar after bar was broken away. A few grand men escaped and devoted their lives to the liberation of their fellows.

Safe gender is being who and what we want to be when we want to be that, with no threat of censure or violence. Safe gender is going as far in any direction as we wish, With no threat to our health, or anyone else’s. Safe gender is not being pressured into passing, not Having to lie, not having to hide. Sane gender is asking questions about gender - talking To people who do gender, and opening up about our Gender histories and our gender desires. Sane gender is probably very, very funny. Consensual gender is respecting each others’ definition Of gender, and respecting the wishes of some to be alone, And respecting the intentions of others to be inclusive in Their own time. Consensual gender is non-violent in that it doesn’t force Its way in on anyone. Consensual gender opens its arms and welcomes all People as gender outcasts - whoever is willing to admit it.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. Individual loneliness is a personal drama; one can feel lonely even in the midst of great natural beauty. An outcast in the world, indifferent to its being dazzling or dismal, self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama—such is the fate of the solitary. The feeling of cosmic loneliness, on the other hand, stems not so much from man's subjective agony as from an awareness of the world's isolation, of objective nothingness. It is as if all the splendors of this world were to vanish at once, leaving behind the dull monotony of a cemetery. Many are haunted by the vision of an abandoned world encased in glacial solitude, untouched by even the pale reflections of a crepuscular light. Who is more unhappy? He who feels his own loneliness or he who feels the loneliness of the world? Impossible to tell, and besides, why should I bother with a classification of loneliness? Is it not enough that one is alone?

But they don't deserve to be winning!" "And who does in this world, Roland? Only the gifted and the beautiful and the brave? What about the rest of us, Champ? What about the wretched, for example? What about the weak and the lowly and the desperate and the fearful and the deprived, to name but a few who come to mind? What about losers? What about failures? What about the ordinary fucking outcasts of this world - who happen to comprise ninety percent of the human race! Don't they have dreams, Agni? Don't they have hopes? Just who told you clean-cut bastards own the world anyway? Who put you clean-cut bastards in charge, that's what I'd like to know! Oh, let me tell you something. All-American Adonis : you fair-haired sons of bitches have had your day. It's all over, Agni. We're not playing according to your clean-cut rules anymore - we're playing according to our own! The Revolution has begun! Henceforth the Mundys are the master race! Long live Glorious Mundy!

People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.

Jesus was consistently on the side of those who were outcast by society and bore the unfair burden of disdain, discrimination, and prejudice. It is likely that he would look at modern-day lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and hold real sympathy for them and their plight. He would have understood the implications of a system set up to benefit the heterosexual majority over the homosexual minority. It is hard to imagine Jesus joining in the wholesale discrimination against LGBT people. Isn't it logical that he would be sympathetic to young gay teens who take their own lives rather than live with the stigma attached to their sexual orientation? Would he not be found speaking a word of support, encouragement, and hope to them? Would he not be seeking a change in the hearts of those who treat them as outcasts?

I’d found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon. I learned how to blend. I could play sports with the jocks. I could talk computers with the nerds. I could jump in the circle and dance with the township kids. I popped around to everyone, working, chatting, telling jokes, making deliveries. I was like a weed dealer, but of food. The weed guy is always welcome at the party. He’s not a part of the circle, but he’s invited into the circle temporarily because of what he can offer. That’s who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share. For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I’d drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I’d perform for them. I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

The carnivals gave me my names, Edward. Sometimes I was the Blue Man of the North Pole, or the Blue Man of Algeria, or the Blue Man of New Zealand. I had never been to any of these places, of course, but it was pleasant to be considered exotic, if only on a painted sign. The 'show' was simple. I would sit on the stage, half undressed, as people walked past and the barker told them how pathetic I was. For this, I was able to put a few coins in my pocket. The manager once called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished. One winter, I came to this pier. Ruby Pier. They were starting a sideshow called the Curious Citizens. I liked the idea of being in one place, escaping the bumpy horse carts of carnival life. This became my home. I lived in a room above a sausage shop. I played cards at night with the other sideshow walkers, with the tinsmiths, sometimes even with your father. In the early mornings, if I wore long shirts and draped my head in a towel, I could walk along the beach without scaring people. It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely know.' He stopped. He looked at Eddie. Do you understand? Why we're here? This is not your heaven. It's mine.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting in caste mixing.3 Purity

Fairy tales, fantasy, legend and myth...these stories, and their topics, and the symbolism and interpretation of those topics...these things have always held an inexplicable fascination for me," she writes. "That fascination is at least in part an integral part of my character — I was always the kind of child who was convinced that elves lived in the parks, that trees were animate, and that holes in floorboards housed fairies rather than rodents. You need to know that my parents, unlike those typically found in fairy tales — the wicked stepmothers, the fathers who sold off their own flesh and blood if the need arose — had only the best intentions for their only child. They wanted me to be well educated, well cared for, safe — so rather than entrusting me to the public school system, which has engendered so many ugly urban legends, they sent me to a private school, where, automatically, I was outcast for being a latecomer, for being poor, for being unusual. However, as every cloud does have a silver lining — and every miserable private institution an excellent library — there was some solace to be found, between the carved oak cases, surrounded by the well–lined shelves, among the pages of the heavy antique tomes, within the realms of fantasy. Libraries and bookshops, and indulgent parents, and myriad books housed in a plethora of nooks to hide in when I should have been attending math classes...or cleaning my room...or doing homework...provided me with an alternative to a reality I didn't much like. Ten years ago, you could have seen a number of things in the literary field that just don't seem to exist anymore: valuable antique volumes routinely available on library shelves; privately run bookshops, rather than faceless chains; and one particular little girl who haunted both the latter two institutions. In either, you could have seen some variation upon a scene played out so often that it almost became an archetype: A little girl, contorted, with her legs twisted beneath her, shoulders hunched to bring her long nose closer to the pages that she peruses. Her eyes are glued to the pages, rapt with interest. Within them, she finds the kingdoms of Myth. Their borders stand unguarded, and any who would venture past them are free to stay and occupy themselves as they would.