Quotes About Alienation

We are frequently being reminded that no criticism or teaching is ever completely politically "innocent." True, but should we accept the swing to the indoctrination of an unqualifiedly negative attitude, which fosters a sense of alienation, of being a powerless victim? And should we permit a simplistic view of "power" to trigger simplistic notions of alternatives and processes of social change?

Surely you can feel it. Do you ever feel lost, as though people are speaking a foreign language, as though there's something going on which everyone else gets, but you don't?

The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, i.e., supranatural or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.

With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possibly be on this side of the grave.

I know these ghosts. I know what it's like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it's like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing. If I exist, why can't they?

Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper.

Isolation, I think, is the worst thing in the world.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.

When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You

God, through the Law, His alien work, brings man to despair and humility and to a recognition of his need, and through the Gospel, His appropriate work, He gives man faith and the knowledge of His forgiveness.

D isables our feelings—2 Peter 2:19 E nergy drain—Psalm 146:7–8 N egates our growth—Psalm 107:13–14 I solates us from God—Genesis 3:7–8 A lienates us from other human relationships—Ephesians 4:25 L engthens our pain—Jeremiah 30:17

Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.

Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible.

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak.

To be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in. The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also pervaded by a low-grade chronic depression. This has to do with the sadness of losing one's authentic self. Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame is the rejection of the self by the self.

if you were never allowed to express anger in your family, your anger becomes an alienated part of yourself. You experience toxic shame when you feel angry. This part of you must be disowned or severed. There is no way to get rid of your emotional power of anger. Anger is self-preserving and self-protecting energy. Without this energy you become a doormat and a people-pleaser. As your feelings, needs and drives are bound by toxic shame, more and more of you is alienated.

Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self doubt, isolating loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions and disorders of narcissism.

Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy's old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile.

And he recognized that he was separated only by a pane of glass from a life that was as strange to him as life on the moon.

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.

Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?