Quotes About Alienation

Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?

Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.

Todavía puedo ver aquella figura, pálidamente pulcra, lastimosamente respetable, incurablemente solitaria. Era Bartleby.

Ah! - dice il romantico, e indossa l'abito di un sistema estraneo di valori: - Ah! Ora sono dei vostri e non sono più solo. Ah! - dice l'esteta, e indossa lo stesso abito: - io resto solo, ma questo è un bell'abito! - l'esteta nella sfera del romanticismo rappresenta il principio del male.

Everything is functioning; only man himself is not any longer.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.

There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.

These are bad times for people who like to sit outside the library at dawn on a rainy morning and get ripped to the tits on crank and powerful music.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President‡ feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular—especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place.

Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

I don't think you really belong here, Aviger. Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly. Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. I don't think any of us do. The brave belong where they decide. Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.

Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

I'm like Shrek. Shrek's a nice guy, but people keep alienating him, like they did with me in my younger life. I'm very loving and kind and generous - I'm a sweetheart!

There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

I tried so many times to fit in but I could never ever fit in. I was always like, an outcast.

I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.

If you feel alienated from people around you, it's because no one tries to understand you.

In those times when a kid first tries to express themselves creatively, it sets them on a different path. Sometimes, that path can be really wonderful and can lead to a career doing some of the things you love. I also think that the price on that is a certain amount of alienation or distance created between a lot of the people around you.

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.