Newsflash: Life is strange. (And if we’re lucky, we are strange.) And I’ve found that my life rarely goes for a day without being at least 10 manners of strange (sometimes more, depending on the season). The idea of oddities and “strangeness” is pretty appealing to me rather than uncomfortable (so much so that I actually might initiate strange events sometimes just to see what might come of it), and it means I never have to hunt down juicy writing material.
In honor of the strange, I present a handful of quotes on the idea of “strangeness” in all its wondrous glory.
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.” — Charles Baudelaire
“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men […] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?” — John Updike (from Rabbit, Run)
“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.” — Alain de Botton
