Quotes About Alienation

At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself.

What was irritating was that they sat there with their heads together as though he had ceased to exist. Neither looked around until he cleared his throat again, loud enough that he wondered whether he had strained something.

There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars, and people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what immediately surrounds them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely.

They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself—and from each other.

And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture—two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really—despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might think.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - it comes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts, because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not being able to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in your own any longer than you have to.

Ein tiefer Graben unweltlicher Herkunft schien sie und ihn in ein Nirgendland einzuschließen.

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.

Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

It was really dreadful to be so different from other people…and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star.

It was really dreadful to be different from other people...and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star.

It really was dreadful to be so different from other people... and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were being strayed from another star.

But then, no one really got her. No one in the world understood. Hell, if she was honest with herself, not even she understood.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.

People he had known all his life were all around him, but they simply didn't see him.

The reason I'm so crazy is because nobody cares anything about me. I don't guess there's anybody I care much about, either. It's my own fault, though - I haven't had the guts to try and do anything about it.

We play your part in order to understand you, but you each seem to play a thousand parts. It makes things difficult for an honest, hard-working bug-eyed monster.

Plenty of people on the street but all glued to their phones. Everyone was perpetually connected, but to what? She

She hated the powerlessness. The feeling of weakness always lurking beneath the surface, making her confidence seem phony, making her feel like a fraud. Other people in her profession went about the whir of life so nonchalantly, and their ease had always felt alien to her. It made her feel estranged from everyone else. How could people see what they saw—especially social workers and beat cops who saw everything—and not be consumed with anger all the time? How did they do it? Tara

I'm the only one sitting alone, under the glowing neon sign which reads, Complete and Total Loser, Not Quite Sane. Stay Away. Do Not Feed.

She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. You're lost! You're angry! You're in the wrong school! You're in the wrong country! You're on the wrong planet!

I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of August watching bad cartoons. I didn't go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don't have anyone to sit with. I am Outcast.

Of course I want to be a model. I want to paint my eyelids gold. I saw that on a magazine cover and it looked amazing-- turned the model into a sexy alien that everyone would look at but nobody dared touch.