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Misfit Quotes

Browse 48 quotes about Misfit.

Misfit Quotes

“That was the thing about her. When you told her about an incident where you so badly screwed up, half expecting her to laugh at you in amusement, half anticipating a smirk of disgust, she would hardly express her pity or maybe she did express what she felt, for she would just nod her head, gesturing you to go on... As if it's normal... As if you're normal.”

“I can see every day that a squirrel's perfectly at home in a world of trees. But imagine taking that squirrel and plunking him down in the middle of the desert. This wonderful animal will suddenly feel depressed, anxious, confused, completely at a loss. There are plenty of animals who make a home in the desert, but not the squirrel. There's nothing really wrong with that downcast squirrel in the desert. He's perfect. But he's only perfect when he's at home, in a place with lots of trees. In the desert a squirrel is an unhappy misfit. Now imagine doing something stupid: taking that squirrel to a therapist so he'll feel better... You could do squirrel therapy forever but as long as the squirrel's in the desert, he's going to be miserable. But if you just pick him up and bring him to a place with trees, now he's at home and he's happy. There are so many people who are miserable because they are squirrels in the desert. They think there's something wrong with them. They endlessly try to fix themselves but the fixing doesn't work. Yet they keep trying because it's hard to face the ways they're not at home in the world. And yet how simple it would be if they could see there's nothing wrong with who they are, there's just something wrong with where they are. But they can feel more at home than they ever imagined. They just have to look for ways that events in their lives are showing them the way home.”

“Steffy risked a glance at her fellow neighbors and townspeople. She often looked for kindred spirits in the crowd. None were ever found. Just once, she wished to see someone trying to hide a smile, a snicker, or plain sighing at the absurdity. The rowdy outcasts among the community were not welcome in the church. They knew better than to show their faces.”

“Suddenly I caught sight of myself in a glass and saw what a figure of fun I looked. Hitherto I had always taken my appearance for granted; now I saw how inelegant it was, compared with theirs; and at the same time, for the first time, I was acutely aware of social inferiority. I felt utterly out of place among these smart rich people, and a misfit everywhere.”

“You don’t need to fit into any square, round or triangular holes anymore. You don’t need to fit into a pretty package or be the same as everybody else. You just need to accept and love yourself exactly as you are.”

“It's funny, you know, they're always telling me to be a man, take it like a man, act like a man, like they're afraid if they don't keep reminding me I'll grow up to be a centaur or a dining room table, like they know, somehow, that I'm not a man, like it's a spell they can cast, if they say it enough I'll be tricked into being a man forever." ..."Yes." Tamburlaine nodded. "They always say: be a lady, speak like a lady, behave like a little lady, that's not very ladylike, is it, dear?" "Well, I won't be a man, or take anything like one or act like one!" The troll inside him rubbed his hands gleefully, crackling with anticipation. "Come on, then... Don't let's be men, or ladies either. Don't let's act like them or behave like them or speak like them!”

“Even in the mid-1990s geeks were fair game. One afternoon a colleague and I were standing on either side of one of the narrow aisles between the banks of trading desks on the floor when one of the chief traders walked between us, his head momentarily between ours. At that instant he winced, clutched his head with both hands as though in excruciating pain, and exclaimed, “Aarrggh-hhh! The force field! It’s too intense! Let me out of the way!”

“The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy -- that he looked like a 'wop'. Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in,”

“When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we crossed the threshold we would throw them under the bench so hard that they struck the wall and raised a cloud of dust; this was "the way it should be done." But the new boy either failed to notice this maneuver or was too shy to perform it himself, for he was still holding his cap on his lap at the end of the prayer. It was a head-gear of composite nature, combining elements of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter-skin cap and the cotton nightcap--one of those wretched things whose mute ugliness has great depths of expression, like an idiot's face. Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and finally there was a kind of bag terminating in a cardboard-lined polygon covered with complicated braid. A network of gold wire was attached to the top of this polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel. The cap was new; its visor was shiny. "Stand up," said the teacher. He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He bent down and picked it up. A boy beside him knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once again. "Will you please put your helmet away?" said the teacher, a witty man.”

“At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.”

“We all have a soul purpose. I can't be everything that the world needs, even if i dabble between all the crafts that shape me. I can be the expressive queen i am though, crumbling all the comfort zones this world has tried to build around me; to stop the evolution of my spirit. One day i am a calm breeze, the next i am a wild hurricaine - i am so deeply passionate, you'll feel me without a single hello.”

“These were the very same systems that Marshall wrote in 1992 would be "progressively less central to military operations" because they would become large, vulnerable targets as US adversaries developed their own reconnaissance-strike complexes. And yet it was into these legacy systems that Washington poured billions of dollars, year after year. And because Washington focused on means more than ends, pieces more than networks, platforms more than kill chains, the US military has ended up with an array of sensors and weapons that often struggle to communicate with another and function together--like a box of mismatching puzzle pieces...”

“Since I am the child of parents with North Korean citizenship, I automatically became a Zainichi Chosenjin with North Korean citizenship. Like I said, when I was a kid, I thought that Hawaii was the symbol of depraved capitalism. I grew up surrounded by books written by Marx, Lenon, Trotsky, and Che Guevara. I attended a Chongryon-run Korean school, where I was taught that America was the enemy. Even so, that doesn't mean I was infected by communist ideology. I didn't give a damn about North Korea, Marx, Chongryon, Korean schools, or America. I was just living with the circumstances that I happened to be born into. And given those screwed-up circumstances, naturally I became a misfit. I mean, how could I have turned out otherwise?”

“When I say misfit, I’m talking about the fact that some of us just never found a way to fit in at all, from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense. I’m talking about how some of us experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly can’t make it in life. We serially flounder, or worse, we drown in our inabilities or mistakes, or even worse—since I’m old enough to understand that sometimes some of us don’t make it at all—we give up. Love and peace to the star stuff that carries those misfits we have lost too soon.”

“I am that piece of a puzzle, which would never fit in any puzzles out there. I am that sky, which refused to turn blue every morning. I am that bird, which always had broken wings and yet always tried harder to fly. And I am that tunnel, which neither had a beginning nor end but one could always see the light at both the ends.”