Quotes About Alienation

For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and a way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one.

Puisque moi-même j'ai longtemps été un pensionnaire dans un asile d'aliénés, je ne peux que relever les tendances sophistes de certains pensionnaires qui les entraînent à se tromper en commettant les erreurs d'appliquer la non causa et ignoratio elenchi et qui consiste à mésestimer l'effet par ignorance de la cause.

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. —The Monster, Frankenstein

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

Y sin embargo, sentía la alienación de estar rodeada por otros que no podían verme realmente o que preferían no hacerlo. Había sentido odio hacia mí misma, provocado por la sensación de ser un fraude, de interpretar una imagen de lo que deseaba ser pero no era. Había vivido con el miedo a que la gente que quería pudiera alejarse de mí si alguna vez llegaba a conocer a la verdadera persona que se ocultaba en mi interior.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, portraying an image of what you wished you couldn't be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that the people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.

To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream

I felt myself shrink to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.

Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying.

I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.

They might ignore me immediately. In my moon suit and funeral veil. I am no source of honey So why should they turn on me? Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn't know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten.

I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow.

I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

Every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles and hour.

His face, with its exaggerated shadows and planes of light, looked alien and pained, like a refugee's.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because whenever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.