Quotes About Alienation

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

As is said about most writers, on the one hand, all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.

Anyone who can be home anywhere really has no home at all.

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

But vilifying those we love always alienates us from them to a certain extent. Idols should not be touched: the gilding comes off on the hands.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers.

All that has to do with life is repugnant to me; everything that draws me to it horrifies me. I should like never to have been born, or to die. I have within me, deep within me, a distaste which keeps me from enjoying anything and which fills my soul to the point of suffocating it. It reappears in relation to everything, like the bloated bodies of dogs which come back to the surface of the water despite the stones that have been tied to their necks to drown them.

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

Leur manière de vivre - qui n'était pas celle des autres - déplaisait. Ils devinrent suspects; et même inspiraient une vague terreur.

C'était un de ces jours froids et tristes où les cÅ"urs se serrent, où les esprits s'irritent, où l'âme est sombre, où la main ne s'ouvre ni pour donner ni pour secourir.

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

Le spectacle est le mauvais rêve de la société moderne enchaînée, qui n'exprime finalement que son désir de dormir. Le spectacle est le gardien de ce sommeil.

A la moitié du chemin de la vraie vie, nous étions environnés d'une sombre mélancolie, qu'ont exprimée tant de mots railleurs et tristes, dans le café de la jeunesse perdue.

So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.

The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws.

The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.

The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality.