Quotes About Alienation

The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

The first time I set foot in Boston City Hall, I felt invisible - swallowed up by the cavernous concrete hallways, and shrunk down even more with every checkpoint and looming government counter. My immigrant family tried to stay away from spaces like these.

In Sweden I am considered the Finnish-Norwegian, in Norway Finnish-Swedish, and in Finland Swedish-Norwegian. I've never really belonged anywhere.

I used to think that the feeling of alienation that I would have was just me, but I realise that it's also a symptom of the modern world.

There was definitely a period when I just felt out of sync with earth.

New York City has changed enormously. My gut impression of it now is that it's like being in a sci-fi novel: 'Blade Runner' syndrome. Nothing seems real anymore; everything is pre-packaged.

I remember being a young black kid in high school, I didn't think the establishment or the political system was for me. I didn't think the system was for me, and I know a lot of kids feel that way.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

While there were some friends who could feel the enormity of my loss and offered tremendous compassion, the world in general has little patience or empathy for loss of an animal companion. Many people were unable to fathom the level of my grief because they could not fathom that level of connection with an animal. To me this is yet another reflection of the alienation from the animal world that our culture feels.

ISIS wouldn't have existed without the US invasion of Iraq. It was born out of the Sunnis' feeling of alienation, their belief that they'd been pushed aside—which, of course, they had been. Sunnis suffered a thirteen-century-old injustice with power stripped from them by Washington and given to Iraqi Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. This grievance is at the core of ISIS ideology. Simply put, no Iraq war, no ISIS. Two

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.

In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia , a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.

There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.

The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

the country's bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They'd become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.

The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

There's something wrong with regular people. They're far from being the best creatures in the world.

Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare

the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.

The distinction often seems precarious. Both traveler and tourist are, by definition, separate from their environment. We like to think that the role we aspire to, the traveler, has that distance on the scene that implies vision and understanding, while the tourist suffers the alienation of the passive viewer, the sightseer. At its worst, tourism is felt to represent a moral or spiritual failing. And in our hear we fear that we, too, are tourists.

when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality