Quotes About Alienation

In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too. As

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his

When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don't like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I'd run into a boyfriend I'd tired of, someone I'd left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere.

How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language.

When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn't a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

Work ends up dehumanizing people.

The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.

I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.

The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you're finished.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.

When I was growing up, I always felt a bit like I didn't quite fit in, a feeling that perhaps still lingers in the background to this very day. I was the small brown girl in the big white suburb.

I think a lot of 'Edward Scissorhands' was about the suburban world that Burton grew up in feeling like an outcast. I feel like there's no way it's not at least a little autobiographical from that standpoint. I always liked that.

When I saw 'subUrbia' on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

You don't fit in with people's expectations. You're not quite the same as they are, and because of that you make them feel uncomfortable. But instead of trying to understand what you are, for yourself, they dislike you for making them feel uncomfortable.

What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

L'élément tragique pour l'homme moderne, ce n'est pas qu'il ignore le sens de sa vie, mais que ça le dérange de moins en moins.

True, I played, fought and studied with other children, but always I stood apart within. … A cosmic loneliness was my shadow.