Quotes About Alienation

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

An air car was just landing in the garden by the pool and beings under it were complaining of injuries and indignities done them. Perhaps this was the trouble he could feel? Grasses were for walking on, flowers and bushes were not—this was a wrongness.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

Probably the easiest and most efficient approach was to hate everybody. Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

The room seemed to have lost a certain essence that he could not pin down. Then knew suddenly what it was. The room was—lonely. For the first time in his life, he knew what loneliness was like. Until that moment the word had been meaningless to him.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

It was as though, in one moment, he had become a stranger. And I a stranger to myself.

He'd always found it vaguely depressing, and yet it shouldn't have mattered that the world was full of people he'd never know when he'd removed himself so completely from the world anyway. This

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

He didn't so much live with us as occupy space. And precious little of it. Sometimes, at the market, or in the park, I'd notice how other people hardly seemed to even see him, like he wasn't there at all. I'd look up from a book and realize Sohrab had entered the room, had sat across from me, and I hadn't noticed. He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air around him. Mostly, he slept.

But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

Soll der Direktor ruhig in seinem Jugendstil-Haus wohnen, ihm schadet das nichts - ihm nicht. Er ist ein moderner Mensch und immun; seine tiefste Sehnsucht wird dadurch befriedigt, daß er auf Knöpfe drücken und an Hähnen drehen darf.

en av os bondestudenter som er blit skadet indvortes ved å bli overflyttet til fremmed jord og atmosfære, han er en liten rumler fra landsbygden som gjærne vil agere frighetsmand og staskar hvortil han ikke er født. Manden mangler hjærtets dannelse, hans blod er falsk i ham. Nærmere uttrykt er han en begavet skøiergut som aldri blir voksen. Det er min lille mening.

When it got dark I jogged along to the Town Hall--God knows how I got there--and sat on the edge of the balustrade. I tore a pocket out of my coat and took to chewing it; not with any defined object, but with dour mien and unseeing eyes, staring straight into space.

Never, never make the mistake of thinking you're the only alien on the planet . But that's exactly the way I did feel – different desks, different schedule, halls and halls and halls that all looked the same to me. Everybody else knew their way around. I might as well have been a million light years from home. And lost.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

I think a lot of people really have religious overtones of having come from somewhere. I mean, even the whole concept of religion is kind of alien.

Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.

New York was not a romantic city at [80th]. Nobody knows who you are and you don't have to care about anybody else. It's a very cold city, I should say.

So here I am in step with everyone now, and yet I'm still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

It just goes against nature for a thinking and seeing being to live among these irregularities and unknown X's. It is as if someone blindfolds you and then makes you walk around like that and you feel your way around, stumbling, and you know that there is an edge somewhere very nearby and that it would only that one step for the only thing left of you to be a flattened, mangled piece of meat. Isn't that just about the same thing I'm going through?

One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, "I don't want V-1"!! Take V-1 out of me!" That irrational root grew in me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me, and you couldn't make sense of it or neutralize it, because it was completely beyond ratio.

Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.