Quotes About Alienation

Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.

One more in a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged retards. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind—everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate or not.

I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.

Mercer doesn't have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn't required to violate his own identity.

to the Bleekmen, we Earthmen may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity, expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all.

I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it.

But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.

The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they'd meditated on how to ball her, and remained.

drive the wild Bleekmen from their last

I am made out of water. You wouldn't know it, because I have it bound in. My friends are made out of water, too. All of them. The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our livings. Actually, there's even a greater problem. We don't feel at home anywhere we go. Why is that?

Pero no puedo usar el videófono -protestó Isidore, angustiado-. Porque soy feo, encorvado, peludo, ceniciento y de dientes separados. Y además, me siento mal a causa de la radiación. Creo que me voy a morir.

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an indeterminable ennui.

If he finds out I'm a chickenhead he won't talk to me; that's always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why?

qué poco sano era sentir la ausencia de vida, no solo en esta casa sino en todas partes, y no reaccionar ... Antes eso era una señal de enfermedad mental. La llamaban ...

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say 'set free.' A Jew set free from Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.

A prime example of spiritual-alienation-from-land-as-factory, I posit. Except why take all the trouble to breed and train and care for a special animal and bring it all the way to the IL State Fair if you don't care anything about it? Then it occurs to me that I had bacon yesterday and am even now looking forward to my first corn dog of the Fair. I'm standing here wringing my hands over a distressed swine and then I'm going to go pound down a corn dog.

Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain.

I didn't know how Douglas and Mickey felt about the news, but the Earth seemed so far away now it didn't matter anymore. Maybe that was the wrong way to feel, but that's what I felt anyway.

capital has become very sophisticated about absorbing people's free time because it doesn't want you to have free time because you might THINK...

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.