The Outsider Quotes

“The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?”
― Richard Wright

“Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't at all dissatisfied with mine here.”
― Albert Camus

“.. I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”
― HP Lovecraft

“Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider And Others

“There are two people in the waiting room. One is an extremely thin old man, a retired teacher of French who still gives tuition by correspondence, and who whilst waiting his turn is correcting a pile of scripts with a pencil sharpened to a fine point. On the script he is about to examine, the essay title can be read:

In Hell, Raskolnikov meets Meursault (“The Outsider”). Imagine a dialogue between them using material from both novels.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Once, over drinks, Ralph had asked Pelley why he had gone over to the Dark Side. Pelley replied that he’d put away at least four men he later came to believe were innocent, and felt he had a lot to atone for. ‘Also,’ he’d said, ‘retirement sucks if you don’t play golf.”
― Stephen King , The Outsider

“What she felt most of all on the day when Bill sat down next to her behind a funeral parlor she could not bring herself to enter, was the sense that she had lost something vital; not just a purse or a credit card, but the life she could have led if things had been just a little different, or if God had seen fit to put just a little more of some important chemical in her system.”
― Stephen King

“There is part of us that seems to be little better than an immature child, howling with misery and defeat when confronted by problems it regards as 'unfair.' This part of us is dangerous because we fail to recognize it as a separate entity, and may be unaware of its existence until it has betrayed us into some act of stupidity.”
― Colin Wilson, Poltergeist!