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Rootlessness Quotes

Browse 10 quotes about Rootlessness.

Rootlessness Quotes

“I had no brothers or sisters, so life was not difficult for my mother and me. When I think back, I see her clearly with her thin lips resolutely closed, with something on her face like a mask, I don't know – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. Do you understand? It possessed not a single colour but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. We had no relatives. She and I acted as relatives to each other. It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me... I used to have – you may be surprised – a warm feeling of being free, that there was not a human being, by father or mother, to tie me down as a tent peg to particular spot, a particular domain... I was not like other children of my age: I wasn't wasn't affected by anything, I didn't cry when hit, wasn't glad if the teacher praised me in class, didn't suffer from the things the rest did. I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back.”

MotherFreedomMysteryMaskRootlessnessInscrutability
Book:Season of Migration to the North
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“What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoake’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court of nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoake, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse. His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence. (p13.)”

NihilismSuperficialityRootlessness
Book:Spring Snow
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“Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.”

RevolutionTraditionModernityRootlessness
Book:The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
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“So where are you reall from?" I'm asked now and then, and I can only apologetically offer a list of places I've passed through. In that litany, I cross my fingers and hope that people will understand that I'm a messy agglutinate of all the places I've ever lived in. Like a hologram created by splitting up light beams, a permanent record of all the places I've lived, reflected off me. And as with all things that are required to fit into the tiniest dimensions for efficient and optimal portability, I require assembly,”

RootlessnessUrban Loneliness
Author:Shruti Buddhavarapu
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