Quotes About Alienation

Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.

a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community...

I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings — do you? It's people that make things so — silly. As long as you can keep away from them you're safe and you're happy.

Miss Brill had often noticed there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old,and from the way stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms of even, even cupboards!

We must remember that loneliness is not the real enemy - alienation from ourselves is. We are never lonely because we have lost contact with others. We are lonely because we have lost contact with ourselves.

To me, "queerness" is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

In the one place everyone looks like me--has my name--i am the most foreign.

Art is for everybody. To think that they—the public—do not appreciate art because they don't understand it, and to continue to make art that they don't understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn't understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this "self-proclaimed knowledge of art" that is actually bullshit.

Old age makes you a stranger in your own country.

but the fact we knew less seemed to suit us better. Now we know everything and talk to nobody.

We feed on the world in increasingly desperate attempts to compensate for feelings of incompleteness, separation, and alienation. This is a sorry way to live.

I began to get a feeling ... of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

I stood / Among them, but not of them; in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Ante la burocracia somos todos extranjeros, (...) la burocracia es, en esencia (y en eso radica su utilidad), un código ajeno.

La escena, de por sí, me deprimía. Encender el televisor... Abandonar el mundo, la riqueza y variedad de la vida en ese mundo en el que yo ya no tenía nada que hacer, para encerrarme en la fascinación idiotizada de las imágenes [...]

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.

The predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence.

Where Voegelin seeks to show the Gnostic nature of modernity, Jonas seeks to show the modern nature of Gnosticism. Jonas draws parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern, secular existentialism to prove that Gnosticism is existentialist, not that existentialism is Gnostic. For Jonas, both philosophies stress above all the radical alienation of human beings from the world.

Still, though, when he became the Lizard King he knew his presence made a statement. People shied away from him when they saw him coming. Conversations stopped as he passed by, like there was some kind of malevolent black cloud hanging over his head. And when he stared at others they tended to quickly look away. It used to bother him, but now he took a kind of perverse pride in it. He didn't want to make new friends, anyway. What was the point?

a strange disorientation, as though I no longer knew where I belonged.

Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others; whatever seemed wrong to me, others approved of. I ran into feuds wherever I found myself, I met disfavor wherever I went; if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery; so I had to be called "Woeful": Woe is all I possess. Wagner, Die Walküre

When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.

What if I'm a princess on another planet? And no one on this planet knows it?

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.