Quotes About Alienation

But it was not hatred that drove patients to mute desperation in their childhood, by alienating them from their feelings and their needs. It was such morality with which they were constantly pressured.

This thing she did, her empathy and concern, turned out to have the unfortunate consequence of driving people away.

He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.

Maybe what I want is to cut all ties with everybody. The thread or something that keeps me connected to the world, the worthless proof that I exist.

I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, or emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong, in a home which was not mine, born from a father who was not my father, and from a mother who was not my mother.

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...

For her the room turned cold, the colorful people surreal, as if normalcy was a gift others shared without her.

Anna… envied Joan's deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she'd been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.

It's the outside world that's the prison. The outside world of jobs and cars and cell phones and apartments and grocery stores. Appropriate clothing, plans for a Saturday night, loneliness.

Having to be sober was like being a forty-year-old trapped in a young adult's body. How could I relate to any of my peers? It was like I'd come from a totally different planet.

You become like a ghost in your own life

She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable. The

Sadly, 12 percent of Americans listed no one with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time.

When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than "the sex organs of the machine world,

I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE.

rootless affliction.

Boys, almost all boys, too fat or awkward or arrogant for sports, and not actually bright enough to achieve top marks, find their ways to the darkest corners and dustiest shelves, and there Lovecraft is waiting.

Jim Morrison tells me that people are looking at the streets while I am looking at the moon. I do not feel connected enough [with the issues] to throw stones at a policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world.

Watching in dumb show and from a distance made the whole thing look like some strange strange puppet performance, utterly divorced from me and my life.

I think she knows she's made a terrible, irreversible mistake, but she can't stop because if she did, she'd have to acknowledge the mistake and the fact that people really don't care. They just think she's a freak.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn't see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn't notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.