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Alienation Quotes

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Alienation Quotes

“The Meaning of 'Home' As I travel from one city to another From one country to another From one sorrow to another, I encounter thousands of faces: In streets, shops, parks, and cafés. They all ask me the same painful question: 'Where are you from?' As if they know, I am from a place that lost itself and lost me On a long, cold, and sad winter night. They ask me: 'What is your country known for?' I tell them: 'My country is known for exporting sad stories, refugees, and displaced people. All those who were cursed by being born in it.' Similar questions continue to be asked in cocktail parties, In hypocritical and mediocre gatherings, In conferences and boring meetings. Some pretentiously ask me: 'How do you define "home"?' I respond with Ghassan Knafani’s words ringing in my ears: 'Home is for all of this not to happen.' April 19, 2014”

InspirationalHomeWisdomPoetryCreativityExileAlienationArabic Literature
Book:أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]
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“I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way – but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn’t hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...”

LoveFriendshipPrisonSolidarityAlienationBest FriendsBrothers
Book:City of Paradise
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“Judgements, criticisms, diagnoses, and interpretations of others are all alienated expressions of our needs. If someone says, 'You never understand me,' they are really telling us that their need to be understood is not being fulfilled”

CommunicationJudgmentConnectionAlienationThe Grotesque
Book:Nonviolent Communication 3Rd Ed (Marshall B. Rosenberg Phd) + Nonviolent Communication : Companion Workbook (Lucy Leu)
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“The relentless pursuit of consumer goods feeds the entitled 'false self,' while the insecure and empty inner self remains anxious and wounded—driven then to buy even more goods to cover up the inner emptiness. The empty self seeks the experience of being continually filled up in an attempt to combat the growing alienation.”

SelfPhilosophyPsychologyMental HealthEmptinessMaterialismNarcissismConsumerismAlienationModern Society
Book:Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth
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“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.”

HeartArtSelfGovernmentSpiritualIndividualBeliefFearFictionAuthorityMurderGuiltEmptinessPessimismAutismAbyssAlienationPessimistSystemRetributionExploreKafkaMaterialHollownessTerrifyingGog
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“I’m about to begin halfway saying that— —that she was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me.”

LonelinessIdentityMelancholyIntrospectionAlienationBleakPsychological FictionAbsurdismExistential AngstFeminist Literature
Book:The Hour of the Star
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“Why these daily wanderings through the streets? And all these human beings I encountered: how could they possibly help me? Each of them filled the universe with his or her person. I would trail humbly after them, expecting the unworkable miracle from the first person I bumped into. Then, in order to prove to myself that I was not merely this pitiful rag, this insubstantial object, I would force myself to hate them, well knowing that my hate was artificial, that it too had no existence, that I was turning it on like a lamp in a ruin that had stood deserted for hundreds of years, as though this light was all that was needed to establish the belief that it was lived-in. And I was incapable of retaining my hold even on hate. It gave me the slip, like all the rest, like everything around me. All I could do was roam the streets, an innocent in quest of a miracle.”

LonelinessGhostIsolationAlienationDissociationAnna LangfusThe Lost Shore
Author:Anna Langfus; Peter Wiles
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“Very swiftly I calculated: forty-seven minus forty-four equals three; twenty-two plus three equals twenty-five. He was still facing me across the table. He smiled at me slowly, lazily. He had plenty of time. A lifetime. A lifetime throughout which his chest would go on and on rising and falling, throughout which he would be perfectly free to talk and smile and drink menthes à l’eau in the summer heat. I hated him. I hated him for being twenty-five and for throwing his young life in my face, like a provocation. The café reeled, the waiter, holding his tray high in the air, multiplied between me and the door, the door was fleeing, hiding, stealing along the walls ... A voice behind me was thundering: ‘Waiter! Somebody was still clamouring for the waiter, and it was a voice choking with anguish. In the shadowy room, expressionless faces were bobbing about with grotesque solemnity, as though suspended from invisible wires. The scream which I let out, and which I alone heard, died among the street noises. I stopped running. I walked, like everyone else. I drew breath. And a thought occurred to me, the thought shared by everyone else: ‘‘Isn’t it hot!”

LossLonelinessHatredAngerIsolationAlienationDissociationAnna LangfusThe Lost Shore
Book:The Lost Shore
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“America" Loans Interest rates Endless advertisements Usury and deception Countless heavy bodies filled with fear Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries… America Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills A political, media, and institutional matrix of power ran by one lobby… Credit cards Bankruptcy Debts Drugs The homeless Racism Weapons Strict security measures Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change under the pretext of the homeland security… America Sanctions imposed on this country and that, Internal psychological sanctions imposed on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free… America Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses, injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides and many other carcinogenic substances… America Houses that look beautiful from the outside, inhabited by people who are mostly lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns, or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria, the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them adapt to the psychological and spiritual death surrounding them from all sides… America Fruitless trees and scentless flowers, as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven upon those who stole the land from its native people, after erasing most of them… America Bills Sad letters in the mail, mostly from companies and advertisers wishing you a delightful day and great consumption, encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption, and reminding you that you may die abruptly of loneliness or the toxins that you consume, and therefore, you must seriously consider purchasing your casket and the plot under which you will be buried… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

LonelinessDepressionRacismIllusionAmerican DreamColonialismAlienationAmerican CultureRefugeesArabic Poetry
Author:Louis Yako
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“The Storm Stranger by Stewart Stafford Were I to shed forty coats, Or forty layers of this skin, I'd stay an intruder in myself, At a crossroads in a storm. Stranger in my own country, Pariah to everything beloved, Organ rejection by my own body, A lantern wanderer in limbo. All foul, cast out by my lamp, Saving those mistreating me, Traversing sanity's outer rings, I turn my collar up and trudge on. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

LonelinessMental HealthExistentialismAlienationSelf ConsciousnessWandererIdentity CrisisLimboEternal WanderingsJack O Lantern
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Some people only needed you for transactions. Don’t let sweet personalities fool you into thinking they’ll hold your hand if it’s got blood on it. If one day, you lost a leg, your boss wouldn’t close the store branch for you. If you lost a home, your old classmates wouldn’t lend you theirs. If you decided to give up, your circle will say you made the right decision. No one’s going to save you, but they love meeting you. And so suddenly, when you lose, the whole world turns on you. A freak— as if alienation was only one amputation, one home, one failure away.”

SocietyLonelinessSolitudeIsolationAlienationHelplessnessOutcastThe Goodbye SongOutsiderAmputation
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.”

LonelinessAlienationAnonymityExistential Psychology
Book:Love and will
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“Being customers in our society is dangerous. It alienates us from each other. People will prefer to spend long and lonely hours in front of the TV watching life but never really living. We must honestly ask ourselves this question: Why do we allow ourselves to become a society where neighbors or people in the same neighborhood will only find a reason to talk with each other when their dogs sniff each other by chance? Even then, the talk is just superficial and all about the weather or the pets! Why do we allow ourselves to live in a culture where many people believe that their pets are their best friends because they ‘don’t judge me’ or ‘they love me unconditionally,’ as many like to explain? If we live in a society where the only creature who can understand, love, or support us is our pet, then perhaps we have some serious problems to confront, with all respect to the dogs’ wonderful company and friendship (I have a pet also). Perhaps we need a serious change.”

LoveInspirationalWisdomRelationshipsChangeSocietyLonelinessAlienationAmerican CultureHuman Connections
Author:Louis Yako
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“She wondered how many towns like this existed all over the country?Bucolic scenery on the outside, with its own private soap operas, gossips and hells on the inside. She wondered if the suburbs in huge cities were merely a collection of small towns, piled on top of each other and each place was ultimately the same. The thought struck her as exceedingly depressing. However, her spirits were not in their best shape.”

LonelinessDepressionAloneIsolationDivisionYearningDepressingAlienationSmall Towns
Author:Jaime Allison Parker
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“Most of her friends owned laptops and seemed to spend more time with their phones than anything else. Steffy kept her latest playlists and apps updated frequently. She was a member of what Peter called, The Gadget Generation. She could not imagine what it must have been like before such a time. The unbearable isolation that must have been present. How did people deal with it? When she asked a few older people in the town, they simply said she had too much spare time on her hands. It appeared thinking was a crime in the world she lived”

LonelinessIsolationAlienationFascinationNihilismTeenage Angst
Book:Justice of the Fox
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“The first step to finding internal peace is rejecting the world’s opinion. The second step is accepting without rancor social rejection, an inability to meld into groups. The third step is keeping a serene sense of being while living in solitude. The danger of solitude is giving up on life. A delicate balance exists between pursuing solitude and maintaining an active interest in the evocative activities of life including reading and thinking. A person living alone can find the poetry in their life or slip into the absurd realm.”

ThinkingReadingSolitudeAlonePhilosophy Of LifeRejectionAlienationPeacefulnessPeaceful Life
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Steffy risked a glance at her fellow neighbors and townspeople. She often looked for kindred spirits in the crowd. None were ever found. Just once, she wished to see someone trying to hide a smile, a snicker, or plain sighing at the absurdity. The rowdy outcasts among the community were not welcome in the church. They knew better than to show their faces.”

FearAloneAlienationLoathingAlonenessMisfitsSocial AnxietyMisfitOutcastsReligious Hypocrisy
Author:Jaime Allison Parker
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“Saul stared at his Whisky Sour. He hadn’t heard from Zoe in about a week. Maybe she had lost interest. All at once, the room was filled with people laughing, talking about how wonderful it was to be a couple. He was mildly amused at how disconcerting being alone felt. He had met Zoe about a month ago, when he helped her cross a busy boulevard. Yet, it seemed like he had known her for years. He stepped outside to call and leave another message.”

AloneRejectionAlienationSingleZoeBenzehabeUnassimilatedLost InterestUnreturned CallsWhisky Sour
Author:Michael Benzehabe
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“I’m not sure how old I was when I first tried looking in the mirror and telling myself, with a shiver of pride and a warning prickle of something like fear, ‘I am the most powerful person in the world.’ In a way, it was true. My hands and mind could do things no one else’s could, but I was too young then to understand that some power—the kind that really matters—comes from other people. And what good is being faster, or stronger, or smarter than everyone else when it leaves you all alone?”

MindHandsFearFriendshipPowerLonelinessPrideAloneIsolationAlienationSuperpowersTheonite
Book:Planet Adyn
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“The rhythm and style of my existence, my loves and hatreds, my alienation and the possibility of my deliverance, the morning blossoming of my birth and the unfigurable horizon of my death, and everything that happens to me in the world must first be announced or prefigured in the elementary phenomena of my immanent life.”

WorldLoveLifeDeathExistenceBirthHatredAlienation
Book:The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis
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“I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”

CharacterFree WillAlienationItalyObjectivitySubjectivityHegelCategorical ImperativeEssentialismPolitical AnimalUniversal Reasons
Book:Contempt
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“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”

ClassAlienationAssassinationKennedy
Book:Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993
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“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”

MoneyAlienationCapital
Book:Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
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“The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015”

WarMilitaryMoralityShameGuiltTraumaMoralsPtsdAlienationSoldiersTraumatic ExperiencesTaintedTraumatizedMoral ResponsibilityOutsiderVeteransPost Traumatic Stress DisorderCombat PtsdAlienatedVeterans Survivor Guilt
Author:David Brooks
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“This is going to hurt, but you will have to watch other couples be happier, richer and louder than you. Wait. No obstacle can withstand patience. Wait. You may not think so now, but there will come a time when you will be tempted to run away. Would that be right? Would that be fair? As every matriarch discovers, entire seasons will pass without reward. As your mate's peculiarities add up, what do you do? Wait!”

MarriagePatienceObstaclesDivorceSeparationTemptedAlienationSong Of SongsSong Of SolomonNewlywed
Book:Song of Songs: The Book for Daughters
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“A Sweet Woman from a War-Torn Country” In her exile, they often describe her as that ‘sweet woman from a war-torn country.’ They don’t know she loved smelling roses, picking spring wildflowers, and bringing them home after long walks. They don’t know about the first kiss her lover stole during a church power outage on that Easter evening— before the generators came on. They don’t know the long hours she spent under the ancient walnut tree in her village, waiting for her grandfather’s call to share freshly baked pita with ghee and honey. They don’t know about her grandmother’s mixed grains, prepared each year before Easter fasting began. In exile, they try to be kind, telling her she now lives in a ‘safe haven.’ They assume her silence comes from poor language skills or simple agreement with them. They don’t know life’s shocks have silenced her forever. Now she presses her ear against the cold window glass of her apartment, listening to the wind’s mournful cry outside. They remind her she’s among people who honor all values, beliefs, religions, and ethnicities— but she has learned it’s all too late. She no longer needs assurances. Occasionally, all she asks for is a sincere hand on her shoulder or around her neck, to remind her that nothing lasts, that this too shall pass. [Published on April 7, 2023 on CounterPunch.org]”

WarLossSorrowLongingExileAlienationRefugeesArabic PoetryArabic Literature
Author:Louis Yako
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“Refusing to collaborate with a transendental, totalising and finally determining sense of national identity, Scottish novelists since the 1980s have concentrated instead on individual moments of crisis, alienation and fragmentation, moments dramatising the loss and discovery of self, as they are articulated through the lives of some of thos conventionally excluded from the story of Scotland.”

Self DiscoveryScotlandAlienationExcludedScottish LiteratureScottish Novelists
Book:Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present
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“Wherever I was, I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time didn't mean anything, nothing had form but I was still me, you know? And I was warm and I was loved and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or any of it, really but I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out by my friends. Everything here is hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that knowing what I've lost...”

Life LessonsStruggleDepressionAlienationBuffy The Vampire Slayer
Author:Joss Whedon
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