Quotes About Disorientation

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

Stranger in a strange country.

Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn't following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real.

Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.

Personally I like going places where I don't speak the language, don't know anybody, don't know my way around and don't have any delusions that I'm in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.

Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?

those befuddling networks of pedestrian subways that compel you to surface every few minutes like a gopher to see where you are.

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself. p.71

This place don't make sense to me no more.

Culture shock

The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which is possible to have.

Some people can be so disoriented to God that when he begins to work around them, they actually become annoyed at the interruption!

A learned man came to me once. He said, "I know the way, -- come." And I was overjoyed at this. Together we hastened. Soon, too soon, were we Where my eyes were useless, And I knew not the ways of my feet. I clung to the hand of my friend; But at last he cried, "I am lost.

As McChrystal took the lay of the land, "I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a Mafia-owned bar."34

We were in Shetland for over a month so when we arrived back in Glasgow I felt quite disorientated. It was just everything, the noise, the people. It was weird that after just a month in Shetland I felt slightly assaulted by the city.

I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains.

The Castle—a man haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than he had ever wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further…

He was half of something. A strong, beautiful, talented half of something that was, perhaps, even stronger, greater and more beautiful than he. He was, then, the magical half of something magnificent and unfathomable. She was a complete whole. A small, disoriented, not very strong or harmonius whole, but a whole all the same.

I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn.

Lament is always voiced in the hope that redemption is possible. Psalms and songs of disorientation are always rooted in a failed orientation and long for the time when we will be able to sing new songs of reorientation. Lament keeps us alive with hope when the temptation is to surrender to a defeated numbness.[273]