Quotes About Alienation

Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.

Entonces Constantino y la intérprete rusa y todo aquel montón de hombres negros y blancos y amarillos discutiendo allá abajo detrás de sus micrófonos rotulados parecieron alejarse en la distancia. Vi sus bocas subir y bajar sin sonido, como si estuvieran sentados en la cubierta de un buque que partía, dejándome en medio de un enorme silencio.

What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream

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 wherever 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.

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 wherever 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.

different as the animal with the touch of human hands about him when he returns to the herd

Every unrighteous action alienates humankind further from the ground, making it even more difficult to cultivate food and so experience divinely intended rest.

Beyond anger, beneath fear, past numbness and alienation, there rests within each of us the possibility to be more than we are now. Magic is available. Wholeness is just around the corner. The power of wholeness is the power to change the world.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men

I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

Living among strangers, with no one to talk to.

I not a person, in a world not of persons But only of contaminating presences.

Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts.

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.

It forgot its wild roots Its earth-song In cement and the drum-song of looms.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

There is something wrong when I go to the theatre whose province is the world and instead of being brought closer to the world I am cut off from it.

I wish I was invisible to him, to everyone.

What's the point of living if you don't belong anywhere?

We are strangers; we write as individual captive Martians.