Quotes about weird
page 5

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

God, Bad luck, Secret, Religion

“I wrote my first story when I was fifteen, and sent it—to Adventure, I believe. Three years later I managed to break into Weird Tales. Three years of writing without selling a blasted line.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

I never have been able to sell to Adventure; guess my first attempt cooked me with them for ever!
From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (c. July 1933)
Letters

“I’ve always said that Chris was the greatest songwriter to ever come out of Seattle. Jimi Hendrix could play the guitar like crazy, but Chris had the song-writing chops that we all sort of hoped to get to at different points in our songwriting careers. He had a way he could wrap a melody around odd time signatures and weird parts and make them catchy. He was a beautiful wordsmith. If you look at his lyrics, he obviously was processing his pain and depression, and all of those things. I think that’s part of what people, myself included, responded to when he was singing. With the songwriting he had that voice, there’s not too many people that have that many options with their voice. He could do a lot of different things with it, and have a lot of different characters in that voice. I feel so lucky that I got to be in a project with him, got to hang out with him, and just sort of witness his greatness.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Jeff Ament talking about Cornell on NBA.com podcast NBA Soundsystem ** Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament on Chris Cornell's death and depression, 30 May 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9buvTFxf2EA,

Pain, People, Making love, Beauty

“Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 5 “2001” (pp. 243-244; "ascetism" should be "asceticism")

God, Religion, Art, Motivation

“But the weird thing is that many of the people who are outraged by benign nationalism or the benign pan-nationalism that is pride in Western civilization take no umbrage when someone from Iran or China says they think their civilization is best. This of course is a manifestation of the ancient cult of identitarianism, which the best traditions of the West have battled internally at great cost for thousands of years. Saying Western civilization is great hurts the feelings of some people invested in some other source of identity. And it hurts the feelings of some Westerners because they think it’s a sign of enlightenment to get offended on other people’s behalf or to denigrate the society that gave them their soap box.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2019, What's So Great About Western Civilization (2019)

People, Feeling, Thinking, Hurt

“In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”

Hannah Arendt book On Violence

On the subject violence and power. Source: On Violence, published in 1970. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times https://web.archive.org/web/20191001213756/https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times on October 1, 2019.

Failure, Success, Victory, Self-confidence

“When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

lightly edited
Other sources

Money, Making love, Time, Painting

“The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the power to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’s most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Eight, Kai

Life, Women, Men, Money

“Rose water and raw spirit…weird amalgam of the bearded star gazer and the red haired pianist pounding away at her keyboard.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Malcolm Muggeridge who had an serious affair with her in The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-1947, page=46

Star, Water

“Please stop it with voting for Trump. It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the 30s. Do you think they saw the shit coming? Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Guy, Thinking

“Most of the girls who dated us back then were these innocent chicks whose lives were changed forever after one of us came into it for however long it lasted. We were like a vacuum back then that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside that way. Some people died, not because of anything we did, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.”

Slash (musician) book Slash

Source: Slash (2007) by Anthony Bozza & Mason Segal,, p. 256.

Life, People, Way, Girl

“The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one.”

Céline Sciamma (1978) French director and screenwriter

On her creative process for Portrait of a Lady on Fire in “‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Filmmaker Céline Sciamma Is Trying to Break Your Heart” https://www.indiewire.com/2019/12/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-filmmaker-celine-sciamma-interview-1202193537/ in IndieWire (2019 Dec 05)

Love, Making love, Idea

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.””

China Miéville (1972) English writer

If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.<br><br>Interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

Way, Game, Strong

“I see and appreciate beauty in my weird little way. It’s easy to buy presents or make romantic gestures, but the more simple things demonstrate you really know someone – that’s what I find sexy and romantic. Being romantic is knowing what makes the person you love happy.”

Liv Tyler (1977) American actress, producer and former model

Liv Tyler reveals what she finds sexy and romantic about husband David Gardner https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/liv-tyler-reveals-what-finds-13970530 (February 10, 2019)

Love, Happiness, Making love, Beauty

“There's so many inside jokes because you spend so much time together. You spend fourteen hours a day together and you're together all the time and you're doing all these strange activities and there's strange scenes and lines so you just kind of end up with these really weird in-jokes that keep you going and give you belly laughs.”

Isabel Durant (1991) Australian actor and dancer

Source: Exclusive | Mako Mermaids | CAST Reunion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDGRc7z7zeA (July 2, 2020)

Time

“We'd only speak Korean at home. They [parents] wouldn't let us have sleepovers and sent us away to Korean church camp during the summers. We had weird food concoctions, too, so instead of spaghetti bolognese, we had rice bolognese with kimchi.”

Jamie Chung (1983) American actress

On her childhood memories in "Jamie Chung, Star of ‘Premium Rush, On Her Road from The Real World to Hollywood" in The Daily Beast (25 August 2012) https://www.thedailybeast.com/jamie-chung-star-of-premium-rush-on-her-road-from-the-real-world-to-hollywood

Food, Home, Parent, Summer

“Patriotism was weird shit.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: The Expanse, Persepolis Rising (2017), Chapter 25 (p. 267)

“It's weird; I've been to prison, I've seen the worst sort of violence and negative shit in the streets, but when it comes to putting my heart on the line and letting somebody get to know me in a relationship, it's very difficult.”

Mark Wahlberg (1971) American actor, television producer and rap musician

Source: Chris Heath, The making of Mark, The Observer, Sunday 27 February 2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/feb/27/1

Heart

“For an average man, the world is weird because if he's not bored with it, he's at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable. A warrior must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous time.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Journey to Ixtlan" (Chapter 8)

World, Time

“Comedy is a weird but very beautiful thing. Even though it seems foolish and silly and crazy, comedy has the most to say about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can get by. You can survive when things are bad when you have a sense of humor.”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

Source: All About Me (New York: Ballantine Books, 2021), p. 451

Beauty, Sense

“I like extreme. I never like to be normal. F*** normal. I’m the black sheep in life. I’m the weird one and I like that.”

Dave Leduc (1991) Canadian Lethwei fighter (born 1991)

As quoted in South China Morning Post https://www.scmp.com/sport/martial-arts/other-martial-arts/article/3021025/maybe-i-was-born-myanmar-another-life/ (August 2, 2019) <br class="br">On Lethwei

Life

“The desire to be perfect. Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves.”

Mila Kunis (1983) American actress

"Mila Kunis on Life With Ashton and Making Babies: “There’s Nothing We Don’t Know About Each Other"" in Glamour https://www.glamour.com/story/mila-kunis-on-life-with-ashton-and-making-babies (6 July 2016)

Women, Way, Perfection

“We mustn't be afraid of being called crazy, weird, strange…because, those are all the geniuses anyway.”

Ralph Smart

Quotes about weird page 5

Quotes about weird
page 5