Quotes About Alienation

a metaphysical sense of being marooned

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness

Mechanism! Everywhere – mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.

There is a deeply held grievance; resentment at the inability to win their case by legal means or total alienation from a political system that offers no redress; and finally, a resort to very public violence to coerce the enemy to change its policy.

The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.

I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Sentivo che non ero, non ero mai stato e non sarei mai stato una parte vivente di questo mondo straordinariamente solido e profondamente significativo che mi circonda.

In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing. Society is, ultimately, based on trust; as trust broke down, people became alienated not only from those in authority, but from each other.

I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

I don't like China. Even today, I still feel I have no emotional relations with this place.

I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

You're losing friends left and right. You're being cruel day and night. You're going around and causing fights. And you're being mean, you're being a bi..., and everyone around you is sick of it.

The worst feeling: Being in a room full of PEOPLE & still being lonely.

Being ignored can really get under someone's skin.

For man, there is nothing harder to endure than loneliness.

I walked back through those corridors. My mind was bare, my skin bristling as if it would rise off my flesh. Every noise, every touch, the stones beneath my feet, the splash of fountains from a window, crept evilly upon my senses. The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.

No one spoke to me. I was easy to ignore. It was not so very different from home, really.

I felt myself a stranger to the world

You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange.

Is the something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's normal state and occasions a radical intimacy with, and radical alienation from, one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate confromity? Or is this just another disqualification of anyhting tied to closely to the female animal from the privileged term, in this case nonconformity or radicality?

he says I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names which meet and part… I have two languages, but I have long forgotten— which is the language of my dreams

Everything around me looks like me and I look like nothing here