Quotes About Alienation

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years." The question still hangs heavy in the air: If our behavior is not making us happy, why do we act this way?

Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

There's probably no experience more alienating than fame, other than a terminal illness, where you actually find yourself in a situation that nobody around you can relate to.

Elle y évoque à merveille ce malaise que l'on ressent lorsqu'on revient chez ses parents après avoir quitté non seulement le domicile familial mais aussi la famille et le monde auxquels, malgré tout, on continue d'appartenir, et ce sentiment déroutant d'être à la fois chez soi et dans un univers étranger

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is really not seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man.

Che triste sbaglio, pensò Drogo, forse tutto è così, crediamo che attorno ci siano creature simili a noi e invece non c'è che gelo, pietre che parlano una lingua straniera, stiamo per salutare l'amico ma il braccio ricade inerte, il sorriso si spegne, perché ci accorgiamo di essere completamente soli. [Il deserto dei Tartari]

we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.

What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that — we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.

Guido had lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.

No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

I have a life that's just been a well of loneliness.

There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence.

surrounded by people but alone.

At lunch, I sit with Charlie, surrounded by people but alone. They are talking to me and around me, but I can't hear them. I pretend to be interested in one of my books, but the words dance on the page, and so I tell my face to smile so that no one will see, and I smile and nod and I do a pretty good job of it, until Charlie says, "Man, what is wrong with you? You are seriously bringing me down.

But now she regarded her sister with curious distance. She'd been so actively excluded from everything important to her she felt suddenly, intensely alone.

But sometimes she felt the world wasn't built for people like her