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Alienation Quotes

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Alienation Quotes

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”

WorldSeemsHumanityParticularDepressionUniqueEssenceAccessMaskOverwhelmingRealismContinuingEngagingAlienationEstrangement
Book:How to Be Alone: Essays
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“The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.”

ChildrenDreamRealityTurnsDarkWiseChildhoodCostEssentialsConsequenceCharacteristicsSubmitDefiningAlienationEffortlessDreams And RealityMerging
Book:'Salem's Lot
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“Some days,' I say, 'I feel like I don't belong anywhere in that world. That world out there. 'I point to Grant. 'People walk down our street and people drive down it and people ride their bicycles down it and all of them, even the ones I know, could be from another planet. And I'm a visiting alien.' And aliens don't belong anywhere,' Adam finishes for me, 'except in their own little corners of the universe.' Right,' I say. ~pgs 57-58 Hattie and Adam on alienation”

PeopleKnowsWorldFeelsLittlesUniverseWalksStreetsPlanetsCornersAliensGrantsAdamAlienationBicycleVisiting
Book:Scholastic Newbery Collection
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“but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.”

MindEndsMightCertainFallFoundStepsRecordsDyingPrideStonesNotionDustWitnessDryWeedManifestVagueAlienationDegradation
Author:Philip K. Dick
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“Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.”

WorldEarthSpiritSufferingFoundGrowsNatureMemoriesAbilityObjectsCreaturesEnlightenmentFellowsBoundsNostalgiaRemedyAlienationIngenuity
Book:The Invisible Pyramid: A Library of America eBook Classic
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“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

IfsMenWorldHeartMysteryColorCreaturesLimitsBoundsHorribleAliensBeastWildernessAlienation
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.”

PeopleNeedsShouldWritingBookRealLightTakenConfusionFortunateNutritionAlienationReal Food
Book:In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating
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“Dantes passed through all the stages of torture natural to prisoners in suspense. He was sustained at first by that pride of conscious innocence which is the sequence to hope; then he began to doubt his own innocence, which justified in some measure the governor's belief in his mental alienation; and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.”

MenFirstsMeanLastsBeliefNaturalDoubtStagePrideOughtConsciousResourcesInnocenceSuspenseTortureSentimentsPrisonerGovernorsExhaustedJustifiedSequenceAlienationDeliveranceSupplication
Book:ALEXANDRE DUMAS Premium Collection – 27 Novels in One Volume: The Three Musketeers Series, The Marie Antoinette Novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Valois Trilogy and more (Illustrated): Historical Novels & Adventure Classics: Queen Margot, Taking the Bastille, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Sicilian Bandit, The Conspirators, The Hero of the People, The Queen’s Necklace…
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“Tonight sucks. And look at me. Look at - look at stupid Buffy. Too dumb for college, and-and-and freak Buffy, too strong for construction work. And-and my job at the magic shop? I was bored to tears even before the hour that wouldn't end. And the only person that I can even stand to be around is a... neutered vampire who cheats at kitten poker.”

LooksPersonsI CanEndsJobsStrongHoursMagicStupidTearsCollegeVampireDumbBoredShopsTonightConstructionFreakCheatLook At MeAlienationKittenConstruction Work
Author:Joss Whedon
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“Not for a minute did I believe that this wasn’t goodbye. Still, I had loved and been loved in return, and there was nothing greater than that. It far outweighed the alienation of all the previous years. Bones thought five months was too short; I was amazed I’d been granted joy for so long. “I love you,” he moaned, or maybe I said it. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. The lines had dissolved between us.”

YearsBelieveLongSaidStillsJoyI BelieveDifferencesLinesFiveGreaterMinutesLove YouMonthsReturnBonesGrantedGoodbyeAmazedToo ShortAlienationI Love YouPrevious Years
Author:Jeaniene Frost
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“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”

MenYearsMindChildrenLastsValuesLosesLearningConditionsNormalFellowsSocial JusticeAbsurdFiftyUnconsciousEducateAlienationSchooledUnschoolingEducated ManProblems In School
Book:The Politics of Experience
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“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”

MenUseSpiritAcceptingTechnologyEnvironmentAwarenessDangerousSeriousCivilizationIntellectualIntelligentUnityOperationsImmenseOrganismsTechnologicalHostileConquestInabilityAlienationMysticHallucinationsHandicapsMan And NatureUse Of Technology
Book:The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
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“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.”

PeopleIfsKnowsPersonsSelfMightTurnsFeltUnderstoodFraudAlienationLoathingAway From YouSelf LoathingTrue Person
Book:The Crossfire Series Books 1-3 by Sylvia Day
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“Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.”

PeopleWellsLooksLevelsCitiesConditionsOrdinaryIdealsOvercomingStressPressureAverageEntertainmentContraryAlternativesHolidayConcentrationEcstasyVacationPollutionAbstractionDeliberateAlienationPlungeAggravationOrdinary LifeMonotonyArtificeBustleAbove AverageCongestionPopular Entertainment
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.”

IfsMenWayHumansEndsCommunityPayIdentityCostBuiltWesternMalesTraitsCompetitorsInabilityAlienationEnd Of The Road
Book:Toward a New Psychology of Women
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“The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order....It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.”

PeopleWorldYearsHumansHelpingSpiritualPoliticalOrderFailingEconomicDangerousPolicyDependsSucceedTasksInstrumentsEducationalDecadesEnormousRationalPsychologicalCivilizedGapsForeign PolicyTechnologicalPreservationAlienationFree SocietyWorld OrderInterdependenceHuman KnowledgeEnrichment
Author:J. William Fulbright
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“The principal value of a garden is not understood. It is not to give the possessors vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues - hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation.”

GivingSometimesDonePhilosophyValuesUnderstandingLeadershipTeachVirtueHigherEssentialsExpectationsUnderstoodGardenFruitVegetablesGardeningPrincipalAlienationGardenerCheaperResignation
Book:My Summer in a Garden: Easyread Comfort Edition
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“The universe must be experienced as the Great Self. Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries. New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.”

HumansEndsSelfTimeUniverseIndividualEnergyTermExistenceSupportCenturyFieldsExpressionSourceExperienceOvercomingAvailableCelebrationFulfilledVentureAlienationNew Energy
Author:Thomas Berry
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“Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives.”

IfsMenArtStillsWould BeActionPassionMurderEmbraceFeministSmellCommitCelebrateDimensionsEmptinessAlienationHollowMournSolaceLove DeathRadical Feminist
Author:Andrea Dworkin
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“Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.”

LifeNeedsStoriesReligionOrderUniverseEnergyVisionPlanetsOvercomingBasesRenewalAlienationEvokeCosmologyMagnificenceNuminousRenewal Of Life
Author:Thomas Berry
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“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.”

PeopleWayHumansDoeFactsLyingHumanityIndividualHuman BeingsSupportRecordsPlansMastersCapableCompelledAlienationDegeneratesInvoluntaryDegeneration
Book:The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe
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“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.”

IfsNeedsDoeChoicesIndividualSocialMastersElectionSlaveWideVarietyGoodsSpontaneousToilAutonomyAlienationAbolishReproductionEfficacyGoods And ServicesFree ChoiceSocial ControlFree Elections
Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
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“A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't necessary.”

MenKindImportantMatterLife IsBeliefSimpleSeeingStupidExerciseMassImportant ThingsReasoningAbortionBitternessQuestsThings In LifeSacramentsAdoptedAlienationAvenuesHatefulUnspokenTissuesMilitantMost Important Things In LifeNothing MattersReligion Politics
Author:Rush Limbaugh
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