Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962).
General sources
Context: In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.
“Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.”
Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 261
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Herta Müller 28
German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist 1953Related quotes
“People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone”
"People Are Strange" on the album Strange Days (1967)
Context: People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down.
“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 11, "The Western Mountains"
“It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.”
Source: The Body
Source: A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Attack Upon Christianity, The Instant, No. 7, Søren Kierkegaard, 1854-1855, Walter Lowrie 1944, 1968
1850s, Attack upon Christendom (1855)
“Moving stranger,
Does it really matter,
As long as you're not afraid to feel?”
Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)