Quotes About Alienation

While taking a piss in the men's room, I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No … one … would … care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief.

And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel my flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense that our lifestyles are probably comparable - I simply am not there.

will eventually find myself an isolated misanthrope

Humans tried to develop intelligent machines as secondary reflex systems, turning over primary decisions to mechanical servants. Gradually, though, the creators did not leave enough to do for themselves; they began to feel alienated, dehumanized, and even manipulated. Eventually humans became little more than decisionless robots themselves, left without an understanding of their natural existence.

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time. Usually associated with invasions, abductions, or other hostile acts, the term "alien" gets a bad rap. But over the years, the word has come to mean something very different to me... future friend material.

From this ground zero, a modern meaning movement began to rise, eventually growing to include philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. If the symptoms of meaninglessness were alienation and emptiness, the balm was fulfillment and personal sense-making. The "central concept of human psychology is meaning," wrote Jerome Bruner. And the central task of every individual is to make your own meaning. There is no single formula. But

The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.

If you're going to get technical, you're going to lose all your friends.

Erica's despair has nothing to do with lack of motherly love. She loved Maja fiercely and sincerely. At the same time she felt as if she'd been invaded by an alien parasite that sucked all joy out of her and forced her into a shadow existence that had nothing in common with the life she'd lived before.

She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all.

I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

It wasn't simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there.

They were his family, but even your family could be alienated by discoveries they were not prepared for.

Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

The fact that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation, but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation.

Alienation, the "commodification" of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady haemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.

Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word community were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

When we are caught in notions, rituals, and the outer forms of the practice, not only can we not receive and embody the spirit of our tradition, we become an obstacle for the true values of the tradition to be transmitted. We lose sight of the true needs and actual suffering of people, and the teaching and practice, which were intended to relieve suffering, now cause suffering. Narrow, fundamentalist, and dogmatic practices always alienate people, especially those who are suffering.

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.

We grew up in rural Arkansas without any Koreans close by, and when I go to Korea feel out of place.