Quotes About Alienation

Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.

the sorrow of the disconnected.

Ca ne manque, les chambres. The work is full of rooms—big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down—all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have? And since when, since when'—he stopped and beat with his forefinger on my chest—'have you so hated the room? Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-moi.

For him there was the back door, and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him.

And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three—he is a little older than Fonny—he was already running out of familiar faces.

p.92) I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and fury, and, yes even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets - because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be min - we would always be strangers, and possibly one day, enemies.

You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?

This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a café terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I've always felt a little uncomfortable around people.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I've been quite lucky in that the roles that I've been able to play are all kind of outsiders. And, you know, I belong to so many places and belong to none of them at the same time, so there's this sense of displacement - I very much understand what it is to not fit in or belong somewhere.

Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.

We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time.

I was always an odd girl; I managed to alienate a lot of people. I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry and created a lot of neurosis for myself.

There are different ways that kids who are gay take on the rejection and alienation they feel. The way I dealt with it was to say, 'You know what? You're imposing judgments on me and condemnations, but I don't accept them. I'm going to instead turn the light on you and see what your flaws are and impose the same judgmental standards on you.'

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sane standing in front of you and politely engaging with you. People react.

You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.