Quotes About Disconnection

I didn't feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

New York City has changed enormously. My gut impression of it now is that it's like being in a sci-fi novel: 'Blade Runner' syndrome. Nothing seems real anymore; everything is pre-packaged.

Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you 'go away.' You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.

[A 404 page] is the feeling of a broken relationship.

But after you have been here for a while you realize that inside one country there are two separate worlds.

Adam doesn't get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets.

There's something wrong with regular people. They're far from being the best creatures in the world.

He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general.

It was not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one's native land and sees that one has been abandoned. - Antheil

Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.

He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation.

She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.

The book, Anna Karenina, is] a mirror held up to the real, grimy, quotidian interactions of married life, of which romance is little more than a passing mood: marriage, that slippery social contract that, if it works at all, depends more on indulgent disconnection than on some kind of sacred accord.

I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter.

It troubles me that among my few remaining acquaintances there is no one with whom I can share my enthusiasm for these new things.

I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger.

He looked old, like a stranger. He was someone else, someone whom he could easily hate. (Tom Pitts, Piggyback)

cardboard cutout of a husband, a man who cared for her not at all?

I have a very bad relationship with the future. We don't get on. We just ignore each other.

I don't understand you. You don't understand me. What else do we have in common?

At this moment I do not have a personal relationship with a computer.

Driving a cab is not really a nurturing type of relationship. You take people and they tip you, they may not tip you, you don't know their names, they don't care about you, you don't care about them.

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

Isn't it true (I thought), that one is almost never present, or rather never fully present, and that's because we have only a halfhearted, chaotic and slipshod, disgraceful and vile relationship with out surroundings.