Quotes About Alienation

The sidewalks swarmed with people, the night was full of the noises of the living. They struck Miss Clarvoe's ears strangely, like sounds from another planet.

There is no place more lonely Than a rich man's home.

Quite often, the consequence of gaining literacy or critical consciousness is alienation not just from the values of the dominant culture, but from the ways of knowing and being that characterize one's own immediate family and community.

I couldn't be with people and I didn't want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I'd lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

I a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?

As the people grow colder, I turn to my computer and spend my evenings with it like a friend.

Friendship is not a thing I have ever experienced. Not as a child, and not as I am now.

You're not funny and nobody likes you!

When you can no longer recognize yourself in the mirror, the only way to see yourself then is in the crowd.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

I just don't fit in. It seems like everyone else is sitting on the FM radio, knowing exactly what they want. Meanwhile, I'm the lost one, searching on the AM radio for something that'll never be found.

Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.

Sometimes I've been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

Y padecen la más horrible variante de la soledad: la soledad del que ni siquiera se tiene a sí mismo.

En los primeros tiempos el exilio era, entre otras cosas, el duro hueso de vivir distante. Ahora es también el de morirse lejos.

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve. Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.

Repeated and prolonged proximity to moribund logging communities set off my misanthropy.

After several minutes of utterly dull conversation I began to think of her not as a woman but as a human, then not as a human but as an animal, then not as an animal but as a source of high-grade protein.

The story of an alienated young man cosseted by privilege, smothered by the comforts that surround him, and determined to listen to himself had come to feel personal in a way he had never imagined.

How could you ever feel comfortable if no matter where you went you felt like you belonged someplace else?

There's a perverse and bitter joy in feeling unique, but you pay dearly. Morrissey